


Between Tomorrow and Today

by orphan_account



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe - 1960s, Alternate Universe - 1970s, Alternate Universe - Historical, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-10
Updated: 2018-10-10
Packaged: 2019-07-29 04:58:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 38,562
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16257143
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: “We should make a wish,” Lance says, gesturing to the night sky, black fabric sprinkled with stars.“What are you gonna wish for?” Pidge asks. And then, to test her theory, “Keith?”“What? Why’d I wish for him?” Lance squawks, face flushing. “I was thinking more along the lines of good grades for our finals, not Keith Mullet Kogane.”Pidge hums, staring upward. She doesn’t want to make her wish, because it’s so far out it can’t possibly come true: a world where she can be a girl and a scientist at the same time, a world where her father and Matt aren’t stuck inside the web of a never ending war, a world where Lance isn’t so afraid to be himself. And so she just stares at the glowing pinpricks, blazing balls of fire light years away.(On growing up.)





	Between Tomorrow and Today

**Author's Note:**

  * For [HeyItsGem](https://archiveofourown.org/users/HeyItsGem/gifts), [Blu_Bell](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Blu_Bell/gifts).



> gemma + bella: i don't know if you'll see this, but thank you for the good times
> 
> this is set in the 60s and 70s, so warnings for period-typical racism and homophobia and period-atypical historical inaccuracies, some of which are for the sake of the plot, some of which are just me making mistakes. also warning for mild description of injury.

When Pidge is four years old, Matt gives her the nickname  _ Pidge _ . 

It used to be  _ Pigeon  _ before it was shortened. “Hey, Pigeon,” he says. 

“Don’t call me that,” she says, stomping her foot. 

“Pigeon, Pigeon,” he continues mercilessly, while she pushes at him with her cheeks puffed, half his height, nearly jumping in the air with rage. “Aw, are you trying to fly?”  

Later, she will realize the nickname originates from a compliment. When they dig through the neighboring junkyard, she always has the uncanny knack of spotting the useful things: a wire sticking up from the dirt, a black track of a wheel, a piece of wood. Sharp-eyed and nimble, like the bird. 

Eventually, it turns to “Pidge,” because two syllables is tiring to say, and Pidge will be so used to it that she’s started thinking herself as that, too. Besides, it’s what her father calls her, and Pidge adores her father, much like she adores her brother, although the latter adoration is mixed in with endless annoyance and competition. 

And then it becomes her mother that fusses. “Don’t call her that,” she chides their father. “We gave her the name  _ Katherine _ .” 

“And now I’m Pidge,” Pidge says, because if she dislikes Pidge, she hates her full name more. 

“She doesn’t look like a Katherine, though,” Matt says, mouth full. His full name is Matthew, and Pidge never calls him that, not even when she’s annoyed. “Or a Katie. She looks like a pigeon.” 

Pidge glares. “I do  _ not  _ look like a pigeon—” 

And then they’re squabbling about whether or not Pidge looks like pigeon, while their mother sighs and goes about serving them dinner, calling her  _ Katie  _ throughout the whole conversation and glaring at their father when he cheerfully asks, “Pidge, can you pass the salt?” 

It’s too late. Pidge is already Pidge. 

The Holt family— mother, father, brother, sister, reside in New York, in a neighborhood squirreled away somewhere in its endless roads. They’re not rich, and their neighborhood isn’t rich— signs of its rundownness are everywhere, in the buildings and in the scarred concrete and in the dirt that seems to permanently reside under Pidge’s fingernails— but Pidge has never thought herself poor. 

She will never think of herself poor, even when she is older. She will only think money is tight, and a nuisance. 

Eventually, though, even their mother caves. “Pidge, can you hand me the ladle?” she asks offhandedly one day, before clapping her hand over her mouth. “I mean,  _ Katherine _ —” 

“You’ve already said it,” her father says, affectionate, and that’s that. 

The truth is, Pidge adores her father, but only respects her mother, because her mother seems to always be  _ fretting _ — about how Pidge talks, how she acts, how she dresses. But later, she will realize, that although her mother fretted, she never demanded for Pidge to stop. 

Her mother tries to shape Pidge so she will not be a square peg in a round hole, but later gives up because Pidge will not fit in the hole altogether.

Pidge doesn’t play with the neighborhood girls, growing up. No hopscotch, no jump rope, no dress up. Instead, she accompanies her brother to the junkyard, and eventually, Pidge gets tired of just coming with and insists on pulling her own weight, struggling under whatever metal or wood they’d hauled in for the day, but refusing to put it down. 

Then, she’d help drag it into the makeshift shed, unless it’s a day where her father decides that they’d sell what they’ve scrounged. In the shed, she’d watch her father build things. His job might be that of an ordinary factory worker, but he’s a genius with engineering outside of it. He’d take the scraps and make something amazing out of them: for Pidge’s fifth birthday, she gets a toy airplane. 

“Teach me how to do that,” she begs. And her father smiles. 

“Maybe later.” He ruffles her hair. “When you’re older.” 

_ When you’re older. _ She hears that phrase a lot. When she’s older, she’ll be able to go to the junkyard on her own. When she’s older, she’ll get to go to school with Matt. When she’s older, she’ll be taken seriously. 

Sometimes her father’s projects take weeks, months. His latest endeavor is fixing up a television that Pidge and Matt had unearthed from the junkyard and dragged together, by sheer force, toward their home. And then the Holt family has a TV, although one with a cracked screen and functions little at best. They have no remote or anything to go with it. 

This is during the summer. When late September rolls around, Matt goes to school, and her dad goes to work— he goes to work year-round, but his presence is only really pronounced when there’s no Matt to fill in the space, either— and Pidge is left at home, the smell of drying leaves in the air, with only the company of her mom. 

Her mother tries to teach her how to bake, but it’s boring. Pidge leafs through books she can’t understand. She sneaks into the shed and messes with metal parts. She accidentally drags a scrap of metal through the soft skin of her leg, blood trickling down her shin. 

And  _ that  _ gets the attention of her mother. “Really,” she sighs. “What were you  _ thinking _ ?” 

What  _ was _ Pidge thinking? She doesn’t know. She wanted to build something. Anything. Make magic out of junk like her father. 

“You should try to make friends,” her mom admonishes, and Pidge shrugs. That’s the phrase she least likes to hear. 

None of the girls in the neighborhood her age want to play with her. They don’t like her, find her mean, and Pidge is resigned with that. She builds a stick girl in her father’s shed. But she doesn’t think even her father’s magic with tools could make the stick girl come to life. 

\---

Lance is three when his family comes to America. He understands nothing about it. 

Fidel Castro has overthrown Cuba. His mother and father speak in hushed voices; they come in a boat that smells like vomit and human sweat. When they get to America, Lance always hears,  _ lucky _ . He is lucky. 

He never quite understands why at the time. Childhood is bouncing from place to place, a new neighborhood every year. But later, Lance realizes. They make it to the United States. His parents love him. They always make sure that he gets food, even if it means taking a little less for themselves. 

When Lance is six, they move yet again. 

“It’s the last time, _ mijo _ ,” his mom tells him, a promise. Her English has a thick Cuban accent, while Lance’s English sounds American, although his vocabulary is still limited. 

Their new place isn’t so bad. Lance knows he will have to take up the task of making new friends, but first, he explores. There’s a gnarled tree a few meters away from the house, ugly, yet good for climbing, trunk like a staircase and branches like so many chairs. 

His father works in a warehouse, his mother as a washer woman, belly swollen with the promise of another child. He has two siblings, Veronica and Luis, who tend to boss him around the house, so Lance ends up outside whenever he can. 

It’s October, fall. The browned leaves crunch underneath his feet. A girl slams into him, and the two of them land in a heap of thin, child-like limbs and groans. 

“Watch where you’re going,” the girl immediately says. Then, after she sees Lance’s arms, skinned and bleeding, she tacks on a much quieter, much more reluctant, “Sorry.” 

“It’s okay.” Lance squints at the girl, who’s brushing her dress off. “What’s your name?” 

“Pidge.” 

“That’s a weird name.” 

“What’s your name, then?” 

“Lance.” 

“Well, that’s a weird name, too,” she sniffs, although Lance is sure it isn’t. “My real name is Katie. But don’t call me that.” 

“Okay.” 

Pidge shuffles her feet, abashed. “Do you want to come over?” 

And so Lance does. Pidge’s mom is inside, and she immediately admonishes Pidge for ‘knocking the poor boy clean over’ and insists on getting Lance’s wounds cleaned up. After that, Pidge says, “Here, I’ll show you my room. Well, it’s mine and my brother’s.” 

They spend the rest of the afternoon using their limited materials to construct a pillow fort, Pidge’s mom coming in for a minute to ask if Lance wants any lemonade, and Lance decides that he should come over to Pidge’s house more often. 

“Why were you running?” Lance asks. “When you hit me.” His wounds don’t actually hurt that much. He’s forgotten all about them. 

“I was trying to play moon ball,” Pidge says. “But it’s no fun playing by myself.” 

Lance realizes what time it is before he can ask what moon ball is, and immediately sprints toward his house, where he receives a scolding for being so late. But when he tells his mom he made a friend, her voice softens. “What’s their name?” he asks. 

“Pidge.” 

His mom frowns. “That’s a strange name.” 

See, his  _ mom  _ agrees. 

\---

What moon ball turns out to be one of the games that the Holt family enjoys playing. “My dad made it up,” Pidge tells him. The goal is to get to the moon— which is any random thing down the block, most likely a tree or a fire hydrant— first. 

To get to the moon, one must be in a ship, which means holding a moth-eaten red ball. The ship is placed somewhere, and whoever gets to it first can start running to the moon. They have to hand over the ship once they’re tagged, though. Pidge is right when she says it’s much more fun with someone else; Lance tries it on his own, and it’s boring. But playing with Pidge is fun. 

“One, two, three, go!” Pidge yells, and they start running for the ball, sometimes wrestling on the ground for holding rights. Lance hates it, but it’s usually Pidge that wins, managing to dart around him and get to the moon faster than his legs can keep up. 

“You’re cheating,” he says. 

“Am not,” Pidge says. She sets the ball down. “You know my dad, he says we’re gonna really go to the moon one day. He says the president is putting a lot of money into building a ship.” 

“How much money?” Lance asks, thinking maybe they could make a ship to get to the moon, too. He’s got a nickel and a dime. 

“Lots and lots. My dad says we don’t have money like that.” Pidge wipes her sweaty bangs off her face. Pidge always brings up her dad. She loves him. 

And Lance grows to love Mr. Holt too. He’s enamored with the whole Holt family in general. Matt and Pidge go to the junkyard together on Saturdays, and he tails them, trying to look for useful things like the two siblings do. And he watches Mr. Holt make magic out of trash.  

Moon ball is even more fun with four people. Out of them, Pidge is still the best at it. 

But mostly it’s just him and Pidge, devising ways to entertain themselves. The two of them are carefree, unaware of anything like the Space Race or the growing tension in Vietnam. They spend autumn playing on the street. In winter, they shiver and throw snowballs at each other and play Cat’s Cradle with numb fingers. Spring, they pluck berries off the trees and make chains out of the flowers on the ground. 

Pidge is very good at it, but not because she likes flowers. Just because she’s so fast and nimble, fingers spinning around the stems and slotting them one into the other. 

“You don’t like flowers?” Lance asks, incredulous. He loves flowers. “I thought girls liked flowers.” 

Pidge crosses her arms. “Well, I don’t.” 

Lance is about to fire something back when he remembers. Pidge is a girl. And he’s a boy. 

“My mom said…” Lance shuffles his feet. She’d said it yesterday, and Lance had been afraid ever since. 

Pidge skirts around Lance’s mom, probably because Lance’s mom isn’t very warm to her. The thing is, when Lance had first said he’d made a friend called Pidge, his mom had thought that Pidge was a boy. She was very surprised when Pidge wasn’t. 

And Lance has an inkling that Pidge doesn’t act like most girls do. Veronica was disappointed when Pidge said an absolute  _ no  _ to braiding her hair; Luis thinks Pidge is terrifying; and Lance’s mom just doesn’t know what to make of her. It’s not that his mom doesn’t like Pidge. Just that she’s confused. 

“What’d your mom say?” Pidge prompts. Another dandelion on the chain. 

“She said… when girls and boys grow up, they get married,” Lance says, looking down. “But I don’t wanna marry you.” 

Pidge scoffs. Lance is a year older than her, but she seems so much wiser than he is. “Well, I don’t wanna marry you either, dummy!” she says. “And besides, my dad says girls and boys only marry if they aren’t just friends.” 

“But we aren’t just friends,” Lance says. He’s extremely distressed. “We’re best friends.” 

“We— are?” And here, Pidge stops looking so offended. “Okay, we’re best friends! But that doesn’t mean we have to get married.” 

“Promise?”

“Promise. We won’t get married,” she says, and that’s that. 

In the summer, on a junkyard trip, they pull a giant tire out of the mess, and Matt gets the idea to make a tire swing. 

“On your tree, Lance,” Matt says. Matt and Pidge like to climb on it, and one time, they get Mr. Holt to climb it too. Mr. Holt says his bones are too old to do that all the time, whatever that means, but he helps them affix the tire to the tree with rope, and now the McClain family has a tire swing. Even Veronica thinks it’s cool, and asks to have a turn, which Lance loves. Most of the time, she’s too busy being the oldest to have fun. 

Lance and Pidge will start school next year, once September is around. Lance is nervous, but he doesn’t show it. Besides, he has Pidge. 

\---

The bus is big and yellow and kicks up dust along the road when it rolls up to the sidewalk where Pidge and Lance are standing. The bus for elementary school comes fifteen minutes earlier than the one for middle school, so Matt is still at home. 

It takes Pidge a second to move, clutching the box that contains the sandwich her mom had packed her. Lance nudges her arm, and she climbs up the steps. There’s so many other kids. The ones in the back are huge. She feels like all of them are staring at her. 

Thankfully, there’s an empty seat. She jams next to the window and slouches down.  _ This is what Matt does everyday _ , she thinks to herself, trying to calm down. Lance says something, but Pidge shuts him out. She watches more and more kids come on the bus. The noise grows louder and louder until the driver yells at them to quiet down. 

“Don’t worry,” Lance tries to tell her. “Don’t be scared.” 

“I’m not scared,” Pidge denies. And she isn’t. It’s just— there’s so many new kids, when all she used to know was her family and Lance. 

The bus rolls up to the school, a run-down old building. She and Lance are starting first grade. She’s small for her age, and she feels especially so when compared to people like the  _ fifth graders _ . She follows Lance across the pavement, toward the entrance. 

“They separate each grade into two classes,” Matt had told her. She needs to check the sheet on the wall— she’s not the only one that thought that, however, because everyone is crushed up against the dirty bricks. 

First grade is at the very left. She ducks between the kids and sees the sheet that says Room 04, finding her name.  _ Katherine Holt _ . She doesn’t see  _ Lance McClain _ on here, though. 

“Hey!” Lance shouts, pushing his way over to her. The crowd is huge. “Are you in Room 05?” 

Pidge shakes her head,  _ no _ . Lance isn’t in her class. And she admits to herself that she was scared that was going to happen. 

At this point, a staff member’s been called over to get things sorted out, what with all the kids jammed along the wall. Pidge runs out of the hallway, glad to be out of the crush of the crowd, following the numbers at the top of the doors until she gets to 04, the numbers chipping on the plaque. 

After a moment of hovering, she goes inside. There’s several desks. She’s not sure where she’s supposed to sit, so she picks one desk at the back and plants herself there, stashing her lunch box underneath her chair. There’s a lady sitting in the front, with eyes like that of an eagle and a gray mass of hair tugged into a painful-looking bun. 

Pidge’s own hair has been braided. It catches on the buttons on the back of her dress; her mom wanted her to look nice for the first day of school. 

A quarter of an hour passes before the rest of the room fills up. Pidge is comforted by the fact that these kids look like the kids in her neighborhood, hair blonde and brown and black, thin and fat, short and tall. And so many. They fill the chairs, and the teacher stands up. 

“I’m Mrs. Meyer,” she says. “We’ll start every day with a roll call. When you hear your name, say, ‘here.’” 

It’s halfway down when Mrs. Meyer says,  _ Katherine _ . Pidge says, here. She does not say she wants to be called Pidge, or even Katie. She feels like Mrs. Meyer might scold her if she said something like that. 

Mrs. Meyer goes over the rules. No talking when not supposed to. Ask when you want to go to the bathroom, and always say  _ may I,  _ not  _ can I _ . Raise your hand when you know the answer, although always pay attention, because you might be called on anyway. Pidge doesn’t understand why that is. 

The teacher coughs. “Alright, now that we’re clear on that, let’s go around and introduce ourselves. Say your name and one fact about yourself.” 

Kids stand up one by one, winding around the rows. Pidge is paralyzed.  _ Stand up. Say your name _ , she thinks, when it gets to her. “I’m Pidge,” she says. “I like peanut butter cookies.” 

Snickers around the room. That’s not the reaction other kids had gotten. 

Mrs. Meyer glares. “What did you say your name was?” 

Oh. Oh no. She stands petrified under Mrs. Meyer’s glare, unable to speak. “I thought your name is Katherine,” Mrs. Meyer says, checking the list. “Are you trying to be funny?” 

Pidge shakes her head, sits down. Mrs. Meyer is still glaring. The class is still giggling. She desperately wishes she were home. 

It’s almost a relief when lunch rolls around. They are instructed to go to the cafeteria, where they will eat. According to the rules, when they are finished, they can go outside and play, but they must come back when they hear the bell. Pidge heads to the cafeteria, which seems to hold the whole school, and looks around for Lance. 

Miraculously, she finds him. 

“My teacher is so nice!” Lance tells her.  _ Lucky _ , Pidge thinks. “She told us that if we were good, she might bring us candy.” 

Pidge picks at her sandwich. She doesn’t want to talk. And it takes Lance awhile, but he eventually notices her silence and lapses into quiet as well. 

After they finish their food, they’re allowed to go outside, and that’s when things get better. The air is warm, and there’s a big box of woodchips with a slide and a swingset on it, surrounded by a blacktop and a field with a diamond-shaped pool of sand. The swingset is already occupied. 

“Lance,” she says, pointing at the swings. “We need to get there first next time.” 

Lance grins. The next day, they wolf down their lunches. Pidge’s stomach hurts, but it’s worth it: there’s one swing left, and they take turns pushing each other. School is still new, a little scary, but the feeling of flight partially makes up for it. 

\---

The bus becomes a familiar sight, Pidge and Lance plopping down to sit next to each other. In class, they learn, and Pidge finds it easy, much easier than those introductions the first day. She gets used to being called Katherine by the teacher, and she learns the names of her classmates, some of whom are not that bad, even if none of them are her friends. When it’s this girl, Sally’s, birthday, Pidge gets handed a red piece of candy with everyone else. 

But there are two startling new developments. 

First: Pidge gets a name that is not Katherine, Katie, or Pidge. 

Classes are easy for her, especially math. She finds herself arriving at the correct answer faster than everyone else, and arriving at the correct answer more than everyone else. And, because Mrs. Meyer had said to raise her hand when she knew the answer, she does. 

It’s October when she hears it. “Know it all,” a guy in her class, James, sneers. “You’re such a know it all. Teacher’s pet.” 

Pidge’s face burns. The name spreads. “Know it all,” her seatmate will jeer, when she finishes the worksheet before other people have finished half of it. “Know it all,” she’ll hear someone whisper, when she spells a hard word right. “Know it all,” the whole class concedes, when she goes up to the board to do math. 

At least James’s “teacher’s pet,” does not stick, and that is fortunate, because it’s an absolute lie. Mrs. Meyer despises her. 

It was okay when it was just about the Pidge-Katherine mishap, but in November, Pidge is accused of cheating. The night before, she’d been looking at the formulas in Matt’s middle school textbook, and had written some of them down on her arm. The next day, they take a math test. It goes about as well as one would expect. 

“You’ll stay inside for lunch and recess as punishment for the next week,” Mrs. Meyer says. 

Pidge is too miserable to respond. 

“And don’t you dare try to answer any more questions after this. I won’t call on you.” 

And Pidge doesn’t. The one time Pidge does dare to raise her hand, when no one else knows the answer, Mrs. Meyer acts like her arm doesn’t exist. And so Pidge keeps both head and arm down after that. She won’t pretend to be stupid, she decides resolutely. She’ll just dial it back a bit. 

At home, she hadn’t cried, but when her dad asked her why her face was so long during dinner, Pidge had mumbled, “My teacher hates me. She thinks I cheated on the test. And all the kids think I’m a know it all.” 

“I’m sure that’s not true,” her mom says, consolingly. 

“It  _ is _ ,” Pidge says, stabbing a broccoli with her fork. She hates broccoli. It makes her foul mood even worse. 

“Well,” her father says, coming around the table to put a comforting arm around her shoulder. “About the first thing— just be on your best behavior around her from now on. I know you wouldn’t cheat. You don’t  _ need _ to cheat.” 

Pidge frowns. “What about kids saying I’m a know it all?” 

“Well, Pidge, you are very smart,” her dad says. “And some other kids are jealous about that. But don’t act like you’re stupid just because of them, alright? You’re brilliant.”

Pidge can hear her dad and her mom talking when she’s trying to fall asleep. She clamps her pillow over her head after eavesdropping a little bit.  _ It’s your fault _ , she hears her mom say.  _ What, should I have taught her to be someone else? Besides, you raised her with me _ , her dad fires back. And Pidge doesn’t want to hear what they’re saying anymore. 

\---

The second development is much worse. 

After she’s finally released to eat lunch and recess with everyone else, she doesn’t find Lance sitting in his usual spot. When she looks around, she finally spots him sitting with a bunch of other guys, laughter raucous. 

“Hey, Lance,” Pidge says, walking over. 

Someone looks up. It’s James. “Hey,  _ Lance _ ,” he mocks. “It’s your girlfriend.” 

Pidge can see Lance’s ears burn red, and she feels uneasy when she pushes on. “Are you done with lunch? Let’s go play on the swings.” 

“ _ Let’s go play on the swings _ ,” another boy mimics. Why are they repeating her words? But the worst part is that Lance isn’t saying anything. Isn’t even looking at her. “Yeah, are you done,  _ Lance _ ? So you can play on the swings?” 

Pidge tries one last time. “C’mon, Lance—” 

Lance whips his head around. His ears are fire-red now, along with his cheeks, the blush splotched around the sides of his neck, bright and ugly. “Hey, Pidge, leave me alone, alright?” 

“Pidge?” someone snickers. “What kind of name is  _ Pidge _ ?” 

“It’s not, she just pretends it is—”

Pidge doesn’t hear the rest, already scrambling out the door and onto the blacktop. The swings are all filled up. 

She is six, and she thinks her whole world is crashing down around her. 

In the afternoon, she dreads having to sit with Lance on the bus ride home. But she doesn’t have anyone else to sit with. Stubbornly, she plants herself on the moth-eaten gray leather. Lance appears thirty seconds later, smile nervous as he sits down. “Hi, Pidge—” 

Pidge turns her face toward the window. “Why did you do that?” she asks. “At lunch.” 

“I didn’t mean it,” Lance tries. But all of Pidge’s sadness has been replaced by anger, licking away at her insides. “They were saying you were my girlfriend and—” 

“Are you gonna do it tomorrow, too?” Pidge asks, cutting him off. Because she  _ is  _ a know it all, and for once, she wished she wasn’t. She wished she didn’t realize why Lance had done all that. “Be so mean?” 

And Lance can’t answer, and that’s when Pidge knows the answer is,  _ yes, if try to bother me again. _ She wants to push him off the seat, but she can’t risk getting in trouble. And so she just crosses her arms and lets the silence smolder, lets all the words running through Lance’s brain die as they hit the roof of his mouth, one by one. 

Once they get onto the sidewalk, Pidge screams, “We’re not friends anymore! Don’t you come over again!” 

She runs off. She will  _ not  _ cry. She hasn’t cried over anything in a long time, and she won’t start now. 

“Hey, Pidge, you alright?” Matt asks. Their dad’s not around; neither is their mom. “You seem kinda wack.” 

Pidge crosses her arms. “Lance and I aren’t friends anymore.” 

An expression crosses Matt’s face that’s a cross of horror and surprise. “Why not?” 

“He doesn’t wanna be friends with me anymore,” she says. “Cause I’m a  _ girl _ .” 

\---

In October, Lance gets a new name. Several, in fact. 

Crispy, because of his skin. He’s Cuban, so his skin is several shades darker that of his classmates. “You look like a burned cookie,” someone laughs. “Crispy.” 

And just like that, the name sticks. 

But that’s not the worst one. The second one hurts more, maybe because Lance thinks it’s true.

For some reason, he can’t seem to pay attention. His attention drifts to random things: the cupholder sitting on his teacher’s desk, the picture on the wall, what his mom packed him for lunch. And he can’t seem to be quiet, either. When he’s not supposed to be talking, he’s talking, and when he’s supposed to be learning— he’s— not.  

All the information drifts through one ear and out the other, and he can’t help it. 

When everyone else has finished their worksheet, he’s only half done. When he’s called up to spell something, he spells a different word entirely. When he goes up to the board to do a math problem, he gets it all wrong. 

“You’re stupid,” a boy whispers to him, looking at the 58 at the top of his math test. 

Stupid. And just like that, the name sticks also. 

The last name he gets is Lover Boy. It’s a name tied directly to Pidge, who Lance does love, but not like that. Pidge, who, despite everything, is really named Katherine. Who has long hair and wears skirts and dresses. They call her his girlfriend, with a long emphasis on the  _ girl _ , and it makes Lance’s ears burn without fail. 

“She isn’t my girlfriend,” he mumbles, to no avail. 

Despite this, he continues sitting with Pidge at lunch and sprinting toward the swings with her, because it’s Pidge, and they’re best friends. The days where they do get to the swings first, Lance pumps the metal chains higher, higher, and he feels like he’s afloat. Like he could reach that pale sliver of moon in the blue sky, incongruous among all the white clouds. 

But there’s an ache in his chest whenever he sees all the other boys hanging out with each other, talking and laughing and shoving. In all honesty, he wants to be a part of that. 

\---

When Pidge gets accused of cheating, Lance has no one to sit with. He squirrels himself awkwardly away at the table they usually eat, and the food in his mouth tastes like sawdust. Five minutes in, he gets accosted by Oliver, a kid in his class. 

“Hey, Crispy,” Oliver sneers. “Your girlfriend not here today?” 

“She isn’t my girlfriend,” he says, but he isn’t sure if he even makes a sound, because the words fall on deaf ears. 

“Wanna sit with us then?” Oliver says. (And this, to Oliver’s credit, is a nice thing to say.) Lance jumps at it, immediately scrambling to follow Oliver into the jumble of boys from first and second grade. 

The boys play kickball on the baseball diamond, and Lance is terrible at it, but it’s  _ fun _ . When Lance asks, “do you guys like the swings?” he gets a strange look, and so he scrambles across the diamond with all the other boys, sand on his legs, sun hot on his shoulders. 

They call him Crispy and Stupid and Lover Boy, and Lance is squished to the edge of the table every day, but there’s something in him that craves this. For a week, there’s no Pidge at lunch, no swings. Just kickball and raucous laughter and talk of shows that Lance has never watched. 

But on Monday, after he’s shoved himself into the mass of boys, Pidge shows up. 

Lance thinks he has never been more embarrassed in his life. He doesn’t know what to do with all those eyes on him, malicious and sneering. 

“Hey, Pidge, leave me alone, alright?” he finds himself saying, and even at seven years old, he understands he’s done something wrong when Pidge, who never backs down, runs away from the table to their usual place, where she resolutely eats her lunch alone. 

“Her name’s Katherine, right?” Oliver asks, around a mouthful of baked potato. “Isn’t she some kinda super genius or whatever?” 

Another guy, James, crosses his arms and huffs. “She’s a know-it-all.”

“Ha,” a second-grader says, the biggest out of all of them, with the quickest and dirtiest mouth. “Stupid’s girlfriend is twenty times smarter than him.” And Lance feels sick. Because Pidge— yeah, Lance has always felt she’s smarter than him, but it’s awful getting pointed it out. 

“Whatever. What kinda name is Pidge, anyway?” someone else asks. “You slowpokes done with your food? Let’s play ball.” 

At recess, Lance feels sick, and nearly gets hit in the face by the kickball during one round. When he gets on the bus that afternoon, Pidge asks him some questions, and Lance doesn’t answer them right. He knows he doesn’t answer them right because Pidge gets all stony-faced; it’s the same look his teacher gets when Lance gets the problem wrong. Lance has never been on the receiving end of the penny candy his teacher sometimes distributes. 

“We’re not friends anymore! Don’t you come over again!” Pidge yells, once they’re on the sidewalk, and Lance makes the long trudge back to home on his own. 

\---

He doesn’t know what to do. They have to walk together to the bus, but now Pidge acts like he doesn’t exist, and they sit in silence on the bus ride to and back from school. Lance guesses they’re not best friends anymore, or friends at all. 

It only takes a total of four days for his mom to notice. “Where’s your _ amiga _ , Pidge?” she asks. Like Lance, she’s adopted Pidge’s name, solely because Lance is incapable of referring to, or thinking of her, as anything else. “You haven’t been to her house in awhile.” 

“We’re not friends anymore.” 

And here, Lance’s mother stands horrified. Even if Pidge’s behavior confuses her, even if she doesn’t quite know what to make of this girl who doesn’t fit into this world, she knows that Lance cares about her a lot, and that their company is good for each other. 

“ _ Que pasó _ ?” she demands. 

Lance shuffles his feet, not knowing how to explain. “Nothing.” 

“Don’t  _ nada  _ me,” she says. “Explain. Now.” 

And Lance does, as best as he can. At seven years, he thinks that his mother knows everything in the world, even if she’s absolutely annoying about it, and often times, she does know what’s right. Lance’s voice trails off as the story ends, and her brow furrows in an expression of exasperation. 

“Lance…” his mother says, with the air of someone trying to defuse a bomb with their hands tied behind their back. “Pidge is your best friend, right?” 

Lance looks away, arms crossed. “No.” 

“Okay, not right now, no,” she amends. “But at dinner, you tell me those boys _dicen que tu eres_ _un idiota_. Do you really think they are your friends?” 

At this point, Lance is severely regretting telling his mother anything, because despite her perfectly reasonable tone of voice, this is starting to feel like a scolding. “But I like playing ball with them,” he mumbles. 

“Do you like playing ball more, or do you like Pidge more?” his mom asks, and though language is inadequate, Lance thinks he gets what she’s trying to say.

“Pidge,” he says. A thought occurs to him. “But she is  _ not  _ my girlfriend!” 

“I didn’t say she was.” To be honest, Mrs. McClain would be a bit horrified if Pidge were. “But you want to be friends with her again?” Lance nods, slowly. “Then you apologize. Real friends can have fights, but they say sorry.” 

Lance nods again. His mom raises her eyebrow, taps her foot, then finally, shoves him. “ _ Ahora _ . You live a street away.” 

And so Lance drags his feet down the road, looking at the tire swing on the tree with much more interest than necessary. He hates saying sorry. He has to say sorry all the time, when he doesn’t do well on his math test or when he tracks mud in the house. And the worst part of sorry is that it doesn’t even fix everything all at once. 

When he gets to Pidge’s house, the door is opened not by Pidge, but by Matt. 

Lance idolizes Matt— a  _ seventh grader _ , who knows everything in the world; only Mr. Holt knows more— but he’s never seen Matt’s expression like this. A tight scowl is affixed to his face, and he looks as if he might punch Lance at any moment. 

“What are you doing here?” Matt asks. 

All shreds of Lance’s bravado blow away with the wind. “I— want to talk to Pidge,” he says. 

“Well, she doesn’t want to talk to you,” Matt snaps. “So  _ scram _ .” And then the door slams in his face. 

Lance stares at the door for a moment, and he raps on it timidly. It stays firmly shut, and so like Matt told him, he gets out of there. Lance comes back home and tells his mom, dejectedly, that he can’t say sorry. His mom tells him to try again tomorrow. 

On the bus, Lance does as she says. “Pidge, I’m sorry,” he says. The words taste terrible, worse than even his mom’s cough medicine. 

Pidge doesn’t look at him. 

At lunch, Lance is about to go sit with the boys, but he looks at Pidge, eating by herself at one of the tables, and says, “I’m going to go over there.” His ears flame at the jeers, interspersed with the words  _ stupid  _ and  _ girlfriend _ , but he marches on resolutely until he gets to where Pidge is sitting. When Lance sits down, her eyes stay firmly glued to her food. 

He eats through half his sandwich before he musters up the courage to speak. “I’m sorry,” he says again. The words taste just as bad, but he thinks it’s a little easier the second time. 

And it takes Pidge only a minute before she looks up and says, “It’s okay.” 

Her smile is shy, and Lance feels a little awkward, but mostly relieved. 

“C’mon, let’s finish our food now,” she adds, “so we can get to the swings first.” 

Lance, of course, doesn’t understand any of the real implications of his actions at the time. All he knows is that Matt stops glaring at him, that his mom is proud, that he and Pidge are friends once again, and that the swings are better than kickball, anyway.

Later, Lance will realize that he was never going to be part of the group, at least not really, starting from just the fact his skin was a little browner than theirs. What he currently knows, at least on a subconscious level, is that he can’t be friends with both Pidge and the boys at the same time, and choosing Pidge means giving the rest of them up. 

For the rest of the year, he will hear his new names thrown at him and shrink down in his seat. He does not have snowball fights with his classmates in the winter, and he doesn’t resume kickball with them in the swing. 

It’s one day in April when Lance has officially,  _ officially  _ failed a test, to the point that the teacher is so irritated that she ends up using his test as an example to the whole class, and he’s sitting with Pidge at lunch trying not to cry. 

Oliver passes them. “ _ Stupid _ ,” he stage-whispers. 

Pidge glares at Oliver. “Shut up,” she says. Oliver, of course, does not care, and smirks and continues walking. Then she turns to Lance. “Why’d he call you that?” 

Lance shrugs. “Cause I’m stupid, I guess.” 

Pidge’s mouth flattens into a hard line. “That isn’t true,” she says. 

And the problem is, Pidge might be good with words, but she is only six. Later, she will learn how to support her claims with evidence so infallible that she will win any argument that she wants, but for now, she can only say this. 

So, of course, Lance doesn’t believe her. 

\---

At the end of first grade, Mrs. Meyer writes to Pidge’s parents scathing commentary on her behavior.  _ Girls shouldn’t act the way she does _ , the harsh cursive reads. A criticism on the way Pidge has been brought up.  

The words set off a chain of actions that would probably horrify Mrs. Meyer if she were to ever learn of them. 

“Cut my hair,” Pidge begs Matt, holding out the pair of scissors she found in her father’s workshop. 

Matt stares at the scissors. “Are you  _ out of your mind _ ?” 

“No,” Pidge says resolutely. Tacks on, “I wanna be a boy.” 

That’s a lie. Pidge actually likes being a girl. Likes the freeing feeling of skirts, likes looking at her mom’s makeup every once in awhile. 

But she hates being told what she can’t do more. 

Matt stares at the scissors. “Mom and Dad are gonna  _ kill  _ me,” he sighs, and takes the steel to Pidge’s brown locks. 

And the Holt siblings are good at a lot of things, but cutting hair is not one of them. Pidge’s newly shortened hair sticks up in uneven tufts, and, true to Matt’s predictions, their parents  _ do  _ kill them. Mostly their mom; their dad’s stern lecture might be tinted with slight amusement. Later, it will be Mr. Holt that cuts even more of Pidge’s hair off. 

“To even it,” he says, winking. 

When she goes back to school in second grade and introduces herself, she says, “Hi, I’m Pidge Holt. I like peanut butter cookies.” And the class snickers again. But this time, she ignores the snickers. This time, it’s on purpose. 

Over the summer, she’s stolen some of Matt’s old school uniforms, whatever she can find that fits her. Her mother’s rebukes are toothless. Colleen Holt is beside herself with whatever her daughter is doing, but deep down, she also knows that whatever is happening, she is powerless to stop it. 

Pidge is no longer Katherine, or Katie, ignoring people when they call her that. “I’m  _ Pidge _ ,” she says stubbornly. 

Lance stays her best friend. 

In second grade, they somehow manage to join the group of boys that Lance had longed to be part of. The two of them are the weakest ones, the links that exist solely to be mocked, but Pidge holds her head up high. In their eyes, Lance is the stupid Cuban and Pidge is the girl pretending to be a boy, but both of them know how to play kickball and how to dump snow into the back of somebody else’s shirt, and reluctantly, they are allowed to join the games. 

Pidge wouldn’t describe school as fun, but like dandelions stubbornly root themselves into dry concrete and grow, she plants herself into her seat and absorbs as much information as she can. 

\---

In the summer of 65, as Pidge is about to go into third grade, there is excitement in the Holt household because Matt has made it into Garrison High. 

Pidge knows that their local high school is shit. (Matt is Pidge’s brother and idol, and as a side effect of this, Pidge learns swears a little earlier than some of her peers.) She learns that Garrison High is a prestigious academy an hour and a half away, and Matt had taken a test that allowed him admission on a scholarship, or else their family wouldn’t be able to afford it. 

They celebrate with peanut butter cookies— the love for them runs in the family— and get a dog named Bae Bae. Pidge suspects that the dog came about by manipulation: Mr. Holt has wanted a dog since forever. But it doesn’t matter, because Bae Bae works his way into Pidge’s heart about two seconds after she sees him. 

So as Pidge continues at P.S. 42, Matt starts freshman year at Garrison, and he comes home, starstruck, and tells Pidge all about it. 

“The kids are snobs, though,” he reports. Pidge likes making fun of those kids with Matt, but mostly, she likes hearing the information that Matt tells her more. 

“If you draw an line like this, and then a line to it like this—” he draws two lines that meet each other at a right angles, then a third line, to form a triangle “— and you call the length of the first line a and the length of the second one b, then the third line will be length of the square root of a-squared plus b-squared.” 

Or, 

“Did you know that all of life once started in the sea?” Matt says, as they lie awake at night, and Pidge demands that he say something to fill in the silence. “And then over the course of millions of years, they crawled out of the ocean, and turned into different species. We all started out as tiny bacteria.” 

“Which means,” Matt adds, and Pidge can imagine his eyes gleaming in the dark. “You really  _ are  _ related to the pigeon.” 

Pidge doesn’t understand half of the things that come out of Matt’s mouth. But she understands that she desperately wants to go to the Garrison as well. Apparently, there is an astronomy class that is available to juniors, and she begs Matt to take it when he goes into eleventh grade so he can tell her all about it. 

She gets lucky with her teacher in third grade. Mrs. Green, instead of despising Pidge, loves her, intrigued by the fact she absorbs information like a sponge, by the fact she will work at a problem until she understands it from every angle. Pidge is handed books, waterlogged and drawn over with penises, salvaged from the fourth and fifth grade classrooms. 

She reads those at home, while also sneaking peeks at Matt’s textbooks while she can, because they seem to hold all the secrets of the universe. 

“We have to go to the Garrison together,” Pidge tells Lance, desperate. “We’ll take the test when we’re thirteen and we’ll get in, and then we can learn about the stars.” 

And Lance smiles, a little nervous. “I don’t know.” But Pidge’s face is determined, and Lance has always been bad at saying no, at least to people’s faces. “Alright, if you want.” 

In 1968 and 1969, Pidge and Lance finish out their years at elementary school, Pidge accumulating twice the information as the average person at P.S. 42. The title of  _ stupid  _ has worn off Lance by now, uncrowned by the quiet, behind-the-scenes diligence that keeps Lance up at night but pays off during the day. Matt takes the astronomy class, and he tells Pidge what he learns, who tells Lance. 

For some reason, Lance has no problem remembering anything when it comes to the stars.

As they graduate fifth grade, newspapers talk of skyrocketing casualties in Vietnam. Campuses riot in protest; LBJ slumps over his table at the White House, wracked with guilt and exhaustion. The stories are printed in bold text; alongside it, there are updates on the space race. They say the Americans will win. They say NASA has tested several fit young men to fit the role of the newly coined word,  _ astronaut _ . 

And they say NASA is building a ship to go to the moon. 

\---

By the time sixth grade— middle school! —rolls around, Lance is substantially taller than Pidge. He’s all lanky limbs and uneven tan lines. Pidge’s body seems to have obeyed her desire to not seem like a girl, and her chest is flat, her waist and hips the same width. 

Guys around Lance’s age have started finding girls pretty. No one finds Pidge pretty, and she’s perfectly fine with that. Meanwhile, Lance hasn’t really found any girls pretty, and he  _ isn’t  _ perfectly fine with that. In fact, he’s starting to wonder if there’s something wrong with him. 

“Just cause you’re not drooling over Emily like every other guy in our class?” Pidge scoffs. “I think that just means you’re the only with brains around here.” 

“Aw, you think I have brains?” 

“Shut it, you airhead.” 

The two of them head toward the bus. Some things have stayed the same— they still sit next to each other everyday— but other things have changed. Lance, in first grade, used to think the fifth graders were huge. Now he thinks they’re tiny; it’s the eighth graders that are giants. 

But in first grade, he thought the fifth graders knew everything in the world. Now he’s starting to understand maybe he will never know everything in the world. Not even when he becomes an eighth grader. 

He just needs to know enough to become an astronaut. 

Pidge’s knees were knobby when she jabs one into his shin over the summer, her body shape sharp, like her tongue. “Dad says we’ll be heading to the moon any moment now. Remember moon ball? I think America’s going to get there first.” 

And they do. 

In July, neighbors cram into each other’s houses to watch Apollo 11 blast off into space, to watch Neil Armstrong land on to the cratered surface of the moon and stick an American flag into the dust, claiming, “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” 

Pidge and Lance follow the news religiously, grabbing the newspaper, which they’d never cared much about before, out of their parents’ hands to see updates on, it devouring all the information on NASA and Armstrong that they can find. 

“I want a tattoo of that quote,” Lance says dreamily. “On my left arm.” 

“You’re too much of a baby to get one,” Pidge says. Mr. Holt has managed to obtain a picture of Lance Armstrong, and one third of it is in Matt’s room, one third of it in Pidge’s, and one third of it in Lance’s. Girls might not be pretty, but Neil Armstrong is the most handsome man on Earth. 

Well, Earth, and possibly space, because it’s not just the moon landing that Pidge and Lance become obsessed with, but the concept of the universe in general. It probably amuses Matt, who’s in his final year of Garrison. There is talk of college. Of Princeton, of Harvard— Matt is smart, and can go anywhere he wants. 

Lance wants to be like that. If he went to Princeton or Harvard, he thinks, he’d have no problem becoming an astronaut, which is officially what he wants to be when he’s older. He imagines himself as the pilot of a ship, messing with controls and reading compasses. 

Pidge is boring, he thinks— all she wants to do is  _ make  _ rockets. He figures that she can probably do that. She’s smart enough for it. Lance, on the other hand— well, he thinks defensively, he’s smart enough not to steer his ship into an asteroid. 

The space craze is so great that during lunch in sixth grade, the two of them don’t talk about their classes, debating instead over the possibility of extraterrestrial life. Middle school lunch is long; there’s no recess, which is a bummer, but Lance accustoms himself to it. 

“The universe is so  _ big _ ,” Pidge argues. “Of course there’s gotta be something out there.” 

“Why haven’t they talked to us yet, then?” Lance asks. 

Pidge purses her lips. “I don’t know,” she admits. “Maybe it’s because they don’t know we’re here.” Which are remarkably deep words. Lance, to be honest, is warming up to the idea of aliens— it’s exciting, certainly more exciting than the goop the school serves for lunch. 

“What do they look like?” Lance asks. “Do they look like us?” 

“I don’t know. I don’t think so, though. Maybe they’re giant and made of metal.” 

“Maybe they’re fluffy and purple.” 

“Maybe they’re so tiny we can’t even see them. Maybe they’re already here.” 

“Do you think they’ll take over the world, if they come?” Lance asks. He thinks he read a story like that. The idea of aliens had seemed fantastical at the time, but now, with a rocket having been launched to the moon, it doesn’t seem so impossible. 

“I don’t know, maybe…” Pidge stares off to the side, deep in thought. “Well, I mean, as soon as they saw  _ your  _ ugly face, they’d probably leave.” 

“Would not! I’m gorgeous.” Lance crosses his arms. “You’d probably be  _ happy  _ to be attacked by aliens, anyway, you square.” 

“It wouldn’t be the worst way to go out. Sounds less boring than dying of old age.” 

Yes, sixth grade seems just like elementary school. The material’s harder, there’s no recess, and the eighth graders are terrifying, but Lance and Pidge are the same as always, sitting together at lunch and squabbling like their life depends on it. Nine times out of ten the conversation ends up drifting in the direction of space. It’s predictable. Lance doesn’t think it’ll change. 

Until it does. 

He comes to lunch one day in winter and finds Pidge crying. He’s thunderstruck, can’t comprehend it. Pidge doesn’t cry over anything. But here she is, her face hidden in her arms, and whatever Lance had been planning to say dies in his throat. 

They sit in silence for ten minutes, until Lance hesitantly asks, “Pidge? What’s wrong?” 

She lifts her head off her arms, hair unkempt, eyes red, and whispers, “Matt and Dad are going to Vietnam.” 

\---

Pidge  _ knows  _ about Vietnam. It’s all over the newspapers, painting the text red with blood, and all over the radio. But her dad had reassured her that he wasn’t going anywhere, and that Matt was going to go to college, not to a war. But they are powerless to resist when the draft cards from the Special Service arrive. 

Pidge’s dad technically does not qualify for the draft, considering how old he is. But money can do things. It can shift responsibility from a wealthy young man onto a poorer old one. 

“You can’t,” Pidge says dumbly. For once, she is at loss for words. “Matt, Dad, you  _ can’t _ .” 

“We’ll be fine, Pidge,” Matt says. His eyes are gentle and sad. “The military will train us well.” But Pidge knows it’s not a matter of training. It’s a matter of the casualties that rack up day by day, numbers so enormous they’d caused LBJ to shy away from reelection. 

It can’t be real, but it is. Because instead of a school uniform, Matt’s in army dress, as is her dad, with gray streaks in his hair and a tired look in his eyes. There’s a plastic smile pasted to Pidge’s mom’s face, but Pidge can fake no such thing. 

“Don’t go,” she whispers. 

There is no room for thought of space now. There is no room for rockets when things on earth are so terrible. 

“We have to. I’ll miss you, I’ll write,” Matt says. He engulfs her in a hug, and the worst part is there’s no snark to it, no squeezing her ribcage or yanking up her underwear, a genuine hug that leaves the dampness of Pidge’s eyes on the fabric of Matt’s shoulder. 

When they leave, Pidge’s mom finally drops her plastic smile. “We’ll go on,” she says. “We can’t just wait for them to get back.” 

Pidge  _ wants  _ to just wait, wants the earth to stop spinning and for time to stop its crawl until her father and brother are home, but the logic of her mother’s statement is infallible. She picks herself up and continues to study, and her mother gets a job. 

The house is too empty, too quiet. She continues wearing Matt’s shirts and pants, and it feels different without her brother reprimanding her for stealing all his old clothes. Her dad doesn’t come home from the factory with a bear hug and a “C’mere, Pidge,” and his makeshift workshop is silent, tools scattered around, a shed for ghosts. 

Pidge isn’t herself. She’s a ghost, too. Her whole life, she’s never needed to seek comfort from others, because it was always  _ there _ , in her father’s smile and Matt’s advice, but now she’s empty. 

She knows it isn’t fair to Lance when he tries to crack jokes at lunch and they fall on deaf ears. Two weeks after her father and brother leave, Pidge mumbles to Lance, “I’m sorry.” 

She hates those words. They taste terrible. 

“For what?” Lance asks, spooning goop in his mouth. “You don’t have anything to be sorry for. It’s this lunch that should apologize, really, it’s gross.” 

Pidge clenches her fists. “No. For— acting weird.” 

“What? Why are you sorry for that?” Lance asks, disbelieving. “I— Pidge— you’re  _ allowed  _ to be sad and stuff, you know?” 

“I know,” she says. “It just doesn’t feel like it.” 

 

Gradually, she gets used to how empty the house is, even though it’s an emptiness she would rather not be accustomed to. She begins to act more like her past self, replying to Lance’s jokes with pointed barbs of her own and making fun of their teachers together. 

At home, she tries to substitute her father’s hugs with her mother’s. She knows it’s terrible, since she’s supposed to love them both equally, but she has always preferred her father’s company. He has always fully accepted her, laughs at her antics and beams at her brilliance, while Pidge feels like her whole existence chafes at her mother’s expectations. 

Colleen Holt is tired from work. She and Pidge sit down together sometimes, marinate in each other’s loneliness. The lines around her mother’s eyes, in her forehead, have already multiplied. Pidge doesn’t want to add more. She badly folds laundry. Takes out the trash. Tries, once, to cook, and burns the meal. 

When Lance comes over, there aren’t any snacks to eat. They do their homework together and shiver because it’s freezing cold. “Your coat makes you look like a marshmallow,” Lance laughs, poking at the ugly orange hand-me-down with numb fingers. “Or a pumpkin.” 

“At least I don’t have your face,” Pidge retorts, and Lance crosses his arms. “Hey, you ready for the math test tomorrow?” 

Lance bites his lip. “ _ Please  _ don’t remind me of that,” he begs. “I don’t understand any of it.” 

Back in elementary school, Pidge had dreamed of her and Lance going to Garrison. Now, she understands the logistics of it are difficult. Lance is smart— she  _ knows  _ Lance is smart— but he’s not smart in the sense that tests come easy for him. And she’s tried to help him study, but her temper is short, and Lance’s attention span is short, and their study sessions end up being very, very short. 

“ _ Fine _ ,” Pidge says, although her heart twists in her chest. Matt should be here. Matt could help Lance. 

Her brother writes letters and Pidge reads and re-reads them. _Hey, Pidge_ , they always start. Matt tells her about training— _I’m sweaty and dirty and I’m sorry this letter smells like rat dung_ — about his unit— _our leader’s name is Shiro, he’s so cool_ — about life in general— _I_ _kinda miss you, little sis._

Also, sometimes at night, Pidge sifts through Matt’s textbooks. The language, while still hard, and the formulas, while still looking like hieroglyphics, no longer seem impossible. Pidge thinks, in a couple of years, she could understand this stuff. In the meantime, she fights her way through paragraphs, exhausted by the jargon. 

Other times, at night, she goes into her father’s shed. She doesn’t know why she tries to hide these things she does from her mom. It’s not like Pidge has tried to do anything her mom wants her to do: wear dresses, not cuss when she stubs her toe, talk about things other than rocketships. In the dim lighting, she picks up tools. Fiddles with wires. 

Wonders what she could make. 

In her notebooks she’ll sketch rockets with a stubby pencil. The one-third of Neil Armstrong’s face in her room is nice— she has the left eye, some of the nose— but who she’s really interested in are the people on the ground, who crunch numbers and go home with the smell of metal and oil on their hands. 

She only knows that the rocket is called the Saturn V. She has no idea how to go about building one, but she sketches. what she imagines. Those are just drawings, though. When she does end up constructing something, it’s much more simple, but she likes it better. 

“It’s a motor,” she says, ridiculously proud. It’s just a wire and an operational battery but it  _ spins _ . She’d found a description of one in Matt’s textbooks, tried to copy it, and it  _ worked _ . 

Lance’s eyebrows shoot up, impressed. “Whoa, you made that?” 

“Yeah.” A rush of giddiness fills her, smile splitting wide. It’s the first time after Matt and her dad have left that she really feels okay. Matt’s textbooks are no longer read by nobody, and her father’s shed isn’t haunted by ghosts. 

\---

Lance gets his own problem around March. His problem has a name: Rolo. 

Rolo is an asshole. Rolo is also very attractive. 

Backtrack. In middle school, Lance doesn’t find girls pretty, and he’d been weirded out by it, until he realizes  _ why _ . And then the panic sets in. He can no longer bear Neil Armstrong’s right eye staring down at him.  _ I know what you think of me _ , it whispers. 

“Here, you can have this back,” he tells Pidge. 

Pidge stares at him like he’s grown another head. “ _ What _ ? Don’t you want to, like, marry Neil Armstrong?” 

A flood of heat courses through Lance’s face; that was the  _ worst _ possible way to word it. “Of course I don’t!” 

Pidge takes the poster hesitantly, like Lance has been possessed and might attack her any second. And honestly, Lance might have. He’s heard stories about boys like him, has heard that they’ve been taken over by the devil, that they’ll go to hell, that there’s something very, very wrong with them. 

Pidge asks, “Who are you and what have you done with Lance?” 

“Nothing! I just thought the poster was, you know, yours. Since your dad got it and all that.” He’s rambling, and Pidge doesn’t believe him, and everything is wrong. 

A month before the first moon landing, there’s another important event, which was considerably less broadcasted. At a bar called Stonewall, the gay community rioted against the police. And Lance is not  _ gay _ , despite the fact Lance does not find girls pretty. 

Lance finds guys handsome. 

He is absolutely not allowed to do that, though. He doesn’t want to marry Pidge, and he doesn’t want to marry a boy, either. Because he can’t. He is not allowed to be stupid, Cuban, and gay, all at once. And so he decides he should start flirting with any girl in a five mile radius, as soon as possible. 

It’s actually not that hard. During the day, he can pretend. 

At night, Lance wrenches his hair, unable to sleep, because he can put a facade on all he likes, but he can’t trick his own mind. “Help me,” he whispers to the cosmos. 

Pidge. Pidge is going to hate him. The torment swirls through his stomach. 

He rationalizes that he can just ignore it. 

He can’t ignore it. For gym, all the boys of sixth grade are shoved into one tiny room to change, a mass of sweaty bodies and tan skin. Lance closes his eyes, tries to ignore how scrawny his own body is, yanks his holey grey PE uniform on and off as quickly as possible. 

It’s in this sweaty, tiny room where Lance hears about the consequences of liking guys. 

“Hey,” someone says, nudging him. His name is Rolo; at least, that’s what people call him. He’s half-naked and completely unabashed about it, because he’s got the body of a god. The list of the names of the girls who like him could fill a whole roster. 

He’s never been particularly kind to Lance before, but apparently, whatever this news is, he just has to share it. “Did you hear that Andy Nichols is  _ gay _ ?” he says, and it’s a tiny room, so everybody else automatically hears it, too. 

“Right, I heard he was making out with a guy twice his age behind the supermarket,” someone laughs. “Who’s stupid enough to do that?” 

“I heard his mom’s going to church everyday to see if God can save his soul. Someone tell her there’s no chance that kid’s going anywhere but hell now.” 

“At least he’s not in the changing room with us. Can you imagine a fag like that  _ looking  _ at you while you were half-naked?”  

This is accompanied by a murmur of outrage, like Andy Nichols is right there, already checking them out. “If he did that,” Rolo murmurs to Lance, “I’d deck him.” 

Lance keeps his gaze on Rolo’s blonde hair. “Yeah, I’d deck him too,” he stutters. 

Apparently, this is the right thing to say, because after that, Rolo is a little nicer to him. Flashes that million-watt smirk in his direction, deigns to speak in his presence, picks him for his team in gym. And Lance’s mind knows this is not friendship. Lance knows that Rolo is the worst of those boys in first grade. 

Lance’s heart does nothing with this information and decides to plant itself in Rolo’s hands, where hopefully, it’ll remain ignored, or else Rolo will drop it all over the ground while telling everyone in New York what kind of person Lance is. 

Lance finds his eyes wandering to Rolo’s face, his body, like if Lance stops looking, Rolo will vanish. Lance finds his pulse stuttering whenever Rolo so much looks at him back, his skin flushing wherever Rolo bumps into it. He finds himself saying the stupidest stuff so that Rolo will pay attention. 

It’s to the point that when Rolo asks, “isn’t that girl you hang out with kinda a psycho?” Lance finds himself replying,  _ yes _ . 

It gets so bad that Lance doesn’t even want to fall asleep at night, because he knows that a quarter of the times he does, he’ll have dreams with too much skin that leave his underwear all gross the next morning. But when he stares, eyes open, into the dark, all he can think of is Rolo’s smirk, the fact he is going to hell, and that he’s probably going to fail his math test tomorrow. 

\---

Eventually, the guilt eats him to the point that he  _ knows  _ he has to tell Pidge. Because he tells Pidge everything. It’s not even by choice. There’s something about her gaze, so sharp and all-seeing, that makes Lance spill. Besides, Pidge tells him everything, too. He’s seen her tears. Not many other people have. 

He spends the whole afternoon at her house wanting to vomit, taking thirty minutes to read a single page of his textbook. 

Eventually, Pidge notices his strangeness and puts her own homework aside. It’s not even due tomorrow; she’s just finished everything mandatory. “Alright, what is it?” she asks. “You’re even more distracted than usual.” 

Lance swallows back the bile.  _ Tell her.  _ He can’t hold her back. He can’t be friends with her anymore. “I’m— gay.” 

Pidge stares at him, wide-eyed. “You’re what?” 

Lance starts shivering like a leaf, jaw locked up. “I like boys, please don’t tell anyone,” he manages to force out. He can’t look at her. What’s her expression like right now? Surprised? Disgusted? Furious? 

But all Pidge is confused. “I don’t—”

“Are we still friends? Are you okay with it?” His whole body is being wracked with shivers, jaw so locked up that he can barely force the words out. His stomach wrings itself inside out. Pidge takes seconds to respond, and it feels like an eternity. Time pulls, stretches out like gum. 

“Of course we’re still friends,” Pidge says, and his mind sags with relief, although his body remains taut, flight instinct activated. “And— it’s just, weird. I guess?” 

“I can deal with weird.” Lance has always been a little weird. As long as he has Pidge by his side. 

“Yeah. It’s just not something I’ve seen before. It’s surprising. But we’re still friends.” 

And her words, so scientific, so very  _ Pidge _ , nearly make Lance cry. Of course Pidge is so concerned with rockets and space and the future that she doesn’t care if her guy friend likes a different gender than most. She’s smart enough to understand that deviations happen. 

That night, Lance wonders if Pidge’s words were just a ruse, that she is actually disgusted and is figuring out how to best avoid him. But afterward, they still ride the bus and eat lunch together; Pidge still invites him over to her house; she still replies to him with her usual snappy retorts. 

And Lance relaxes, but he is careful never to bring it up again. Surprisingly, it’s  _ Pidge  _ that doesn’t just shove that aspect of him aside and pretend it doesn’t exist. 

It’s a hot day in the summer between sixth and seventh grade. The two of them sit on the sidewalk. The sky is gray, the air muggy. The whole neighborhood seems gray. Times are harder now; the warmth of June barely reaches Lance’s skin. 

“How did you realize you liked guys?” Pidge asks, feet on the curb. 

And suddenly the world flashes too technicolor. “I—” the words get trapped in his mouth, his face flushing on instinct. He remembers Andy Nichols showing up to school with a broken nose. Even if he’s allowed to talk about it, he doesn’t quite know what to say. “Uh…” 

“Cause I don’t think  _ I  _ like guys,” Pidge says, and Lance, for a single ludicrous second, wonders if Pidge is a lesbian. “I mean, I don’t like girls either. But, how did you know?” 

“Well, um,” he says, stuttering so bad his voice is unrecognizable to his own ears, “you know that third of the Neil Armstrong poster—” 

And here Pidge keels over with laughter. Lance’s face flushes further. “ _ Neil Armstrong _ ?” Pidge gasps, in the middle of her cackles. “That is too rich.” 

“It’s not funny.” Then he thinks about it. “Okay, it’s kind of funny, but—” 

“No, no, it’s so funny!” Pidge says. She’s finally calmed down, wiping her eyes. “So was it just Neil Armstrong? Or was there someone else too?” 

And Lance contemplates telling her. Despite the fact the words feel uncomfortable, there’s something relieving about getting them out of his mouth. And it’s Pidge. If she wants to hear about it, why not? She seems to just find this one of their everyday, normal conversations, somehow. 

“You know Rolo?” Lance starts hesitantly. 

And here, Pidge’s face contorts with disgust. “Rolo?” she says, astounded. “He’s awful.” 

“I know. Don’t ask me why.” 

“Man, that’s… terrible,” Pidge says, face still disgusted. 

“I  _ know _ . I told you. No idea.” 

There’s a pause, and then Pidge’s mouth quirks up in a wicked smile. “Well, I mean, I figured you’d have a terrible taste in guys.” 

“You’re so  _ mean _ ,” Lance whines, and Pidge goes back to laughing. Eventually, Lance starts laughing too. Because honestly, if one takes the whole sin and dishonor thing out of the equation, it’s kind of funny. He fell for a right eye on a ripped poster and a hunk in his gym class with a mess of a personality. 

It feels good to laugh. 

\---

In seventh grade, Pidge and Lance still ride the bus together, but Hunk joins them for lunch. 

Hunk is a soft-spoken kind of guy that Lance had befriended in math class. Like Pidge, Hunk is labeled as a geek, but he’s soft in comparison to Pidge’s sharpness. And Pidge likes him immediately, how he doesn’t seem to have a mean bone in his body. 

It’s why Lance likes him, too. Why they went from being two mutually linked outcasts who happened to both be immigrants to  _ friends _ . Pidge is glad they did. Hunk makes lunch better. Not just the conversation, but the actual food. 

“You  _ made  _ this?” Pidge asks, biting into a cookie. 

“Hunk, buddy,  _ marry me _ ,” Lance says. Pidge keeps a poker face. Lance might be gay, but he doesn’t like Hunk, and therefore, the words carry no extra weight to them. “How did you make this? Are you magical?” 

“Um,” Hunk says, shrinking into himself at the compliments. There’s not much to shrink into— he’s tall, and he scoots awkwardly into the bench. “My mom works at a bakery, and every once in awhile I get to work with the leftovers.” 

There is no such thing as dessert at Pidge’s house, nor Lance’s. “Thank you for sharing this with me,” Pidge says, genuine.  _ Thank you _ sounds weird in her mouth. It doesn’t taste bad, per se, like  _ sorry _ , but she feels a little awkward saying it. “If I were you, I wouldn’t share it.” 

“Yeah, me neither,” Lance chimes in. “I’d probably just eat all of them in one sitting.” 

“That sounds like a bad idea,” Pidge says. “But I’d probably do that too.” 

But something even better than cookies— well, equally as good as the cookies; they’re good cookies— is the fact Hunk knows just as much as Pidge, but is much better at teaching. 

Their lunch study system develops with Hunk explaining to Lance concepts while Pidge occasionally throws in commentary. “You’re not dumb, Lance,” Hunk says, after Lance offhandedly calls himself stupid. And he isn’t. Pidge only understands the extent of how terrible she is at teaching after Hunk arrives, because Lance suddenly grasps concepts when Hunk explains them. 

“Definitely not as smart as you guys,” Lance says one day. “Pidge is gonna be the one who designs the rockets when she’s older. I’m just gonna fly it.” 

Hunk’s eyes rounden in delight. “Pidge, you want to do that too?” he asks. 

_ You too _ ? Pidge can hardly believe it. She nods, and the two of them devolve into a rapid-fire conversation about the Saturn V, talking about blueprints they’ve managed to find. Lance only rejoins once they sheepishly remember themselves. 

“So both of you guys are going to be engineers,” Lance says quietly. “That’s cool.” 

“Well, I  _ want  _ to be one,” Hunk says, abashed. “You know Garrison? My mom wants me to go there. Apparently, if you go there, you can get into any college engineering program that you want.” 

“My brother goes to that,” Pidge says. “Well— went to that.” 

She definitely needs to write to Matt about Hunk. Matt’s letters stay lighthearted, which Pidge is certain is being done on purpose. Matt complains about the fact their Dad insists on writing love letters he isn’t allowed to see and rambles about the cool technology. As time goes on, Pidge gets less and less sure how to reply, but this time, she knows. 

“What do you mean?” Hunk asks. “Is he in college now?” 

Pidge shakes her head. “Vietnam.” 

“Oh, Pidge, I’m sorry,” he says, and his voice isn’t  _ sympathetic _ , but it’s open and real, and so when Hunk extends his arms for a hug, Pidge returns it. Unfortunately, they’re in a crowded cafeteria, and tomorrow rumors that the two geeks are dating spreads. 

“Garrison’s real expensive, though,” Lance says. “I mean, I know you can get a scholarship, but you have to take a test and stuff for that… I mean, I’m sure you two will get it, though.”

_ You two.  _ Excluding himself. Hunk realizes what he means, too, and switches the subject. “Pidge, you built anything?” 

“Um, a motor,” Pidge says awkwardly. She’d been really happy when she’d constructed it, but telling this to Hunk now, it seems a little lame. “I’ve been trying to decipher my older brother’s textbooks, but it’s like it’s not even English.” 

“Oh, I get that. But that’s so awesome! I’ve made a motor, too.” 

“You two should build something together,” Lance says. It’s an offhanded suggestion, but both Pidge and Hunk seize on the idea. 

“My dad’s got a shed full of scrap metal and tools, and it’s not supposed to stay empty,” Pidge says excitedly. Lance is looking dejectedly into his food, and Pidge realizes that, for some reason, Lance is  _ sad _ . “Lance. Dude. What do you want to build?” 

Lance suddenly looks much happier. “Oh, I’m part of this, too?” he asks. “Uh… I don’t know… well, my little brother’s five, and he likes toy cars… could you make one of those?” He leaves it hanging in a question. 

“That works, since Pidge and I know how to make motors,” Hunk says, eyes gleaming. “And we can give it to your little brother when we’re done. This works.” 

Hunk lives a neighborhood away, and they arrange for him to take the bus over to Pidge’s house for a few afternoons and stay at Lance’s for the nights. 

What they build really isn’t much, not strictly resembling a car, but it works. The motor spins for a few seconds when a button is pressed, and the car moves forward. Lance builds the exterior and Pidge modifies her motor and Hunk figures out how to get the wires connected to the button, and all three of them splash some color on it when it’s finished, a mix of green and yellow and blue. 

Marco, Lance’s little brother, loves it. 

“We have to go to Garrison,” Hunk blurts out, afterward. “All three of us. We have to go to Garrison.” 

And here, Lance breaks, says no. “I can’t.” 

Pidge chews her lip, nervous. But Hunk’s gaze is determined. He’s scared and shy on a lot of subjects, but his confidence seems endless on this one. “You underestimate yourself, Lance,” he says. “We’re going.” 

\---

The summer after seventh grade ends is when the studying for Garrison High begins in earnest. Lance and Pidge look over the booklet that contains the instructions for applying and the requirements for a scholarship. The application is a form and an essay. The scholarship is a test and an evaluation of GPA. 

Lance bites his nails. His grades aren’t the best; they’ve went up in seventh grade after Hunk showed up, but he’ll need to do better in eighth grade to compensate for sixth. The upside to all this is that he completely forgets about Rolo, but the downside is the stress that pulls his shoulders down like a physical thing. 

To be honest, Lance thinks he’s dead weight. The chances of Pidge and Hunk making it are significantly higher than his. But Pidge always dismisses this. 

“You need to come with us,” Pidge says, and adds, in a rare display of seriousness, “I need you there.” 

Summer passes without any games. Pidge writes to Matt to ask what the Garrison tests for the scholarship; Matt replies that it’s classified information, before promptly listing down everything he can remember. There are four sections: Math, English, History, and Science. 

Pidge’s worst enemy is history. “It’s weird, I’m good with memorization,” she says. “But everything just slips out of my head in the wrong order.” Meanwhile, Lance hates all of them. He supposes the one he’s worst at is science, but he’s not much better at the rest.

He, Pidge, and Hunk share textbooks, studying relentlessly. It’s during one study session that Lance realizes that the day he decided to befriend Pidge was the day he decided to befriend one of the craziest people on earth. Same with Hunk. No one else is this obsessed with space; no one else is so concerned for the future; the two of them are so focused that their parents beg them to take breaks. 

He thinks he just follows their lead. The strange, relentless path they trailblaze. He thinks himself as a barnacle hitchhiking on the skin of a whale, a picture he’d seen in one of Pidge’s textbooks. 

“You’re not dead weight,” Hunk says, astounded. “You really don’t understand, Lance. Pidge says she would’ve gone crazy without you. Absolutely do not tell her I told you that, by the way; I’d prefer to stay alive.” 

He leaves it at that. Lance wonders what kind of topic would have lead Pidge to say such a thing, but he keeps his mouth shut. 

\---

Somewhere in the endless blur of studying is Coran, who is officially the wackiest neighbor ever. 

“Coran is officially the wackest neighbor ever,” Pidge grimaces. She’s holding her stomach; she’d been vomiting for the past three days. “I’m pretty sure his lasagna was poisoned. And it didn’t even  _ taste  _ good.” 

“His mustache is so interesting,” Hunk says, fascinated. “It looks like it’s alive.” 

“I think,” Pidge theorizes, “that Coran is an alien.” 

Coran has a head of bright red hair, and, as Hunk said, a highly interesting mustache. He had just moved in down the block, right next to Pidge, and had insisted on bringing over a housewarming lasagna. 

“The only thing it warmed was my intestines,” Pidge grouses. “But for some reason, Coran keeps inviting us. Like, I feel like I’m being studied. Yesterday he poured us some tea and gave us— I kid you not—  _ sincere condolences  _ on our stomach flu. That he caused.” 

“You really think he’s an alien?” Hunk asks, never one to turn away Pidge’s ideas. “Maybe he crash-landed on earth while really going over for a party on Mars.” 

“Honestly, wherever he comes from, they must act so strange over there,” Pidge says. “He doesn’t seem to understand that no one in our neighborhood drinks tea, or dresses like  _ that _ . He looks like he’s going to go meet the Queen of England or something.” 

“You mean the Queen of Mars.” 

Yet, Lance could detect a smidge of fondness in her voice. Like Pidge doesn’t really mind Coran’s weirdness, since Pidge is plenty weird on her own. 

It’s a paradox, but it’s precisely Coran’s strangeness that finally solves the mystery behind him. Coran is of much richer standing than anyone of their neighborhood; he used to live at some place in New York that might as well have  _ been  _ Mars with Lance’s current chances of getting there. His wife and daughter had fallen very, very ill, and much of their riches were spent on seeing the best doctors the state had to offer. 

The doctors could do nothing, and Coran moved to their neighborhood, having lost most of his riches and his family. He doesn’t show his grief; rather, he pretends to live in the past. And despite his oddity, there is something lovable about him, how easily he shares, even if it’s poisoned lasagna. 

In August, Pidge bursts into Lance’s house, as much as one could burst into a house while weighed down by a stack of book the size of their torso. “He gave me his daughter’s textbooks,” she says breathlessly. 

“What?” Lance asks, as Pidge is so out of breath she doesn’t make much sense. 

“Coran. He was… showing me some of his stuff, and,” Pidge wheezes, setting the textbooks down on the floor, “these are his daughter’s old textbooks. He didn’t want to throw them away.” 

“He’s an angel, not an alien,” Hunk says, when Pidge tells him about it. “The orange mustache is his halo.” And despite the fact the whole thing is a little sad, they start giggling. 

Once they’ve calmed down, Pidge says, “Okay, but, imagine him with neon orange wings,” and it sets them off all over again. 

The textbooks are brand new, pages glossy and unmarked, written five years ago. Inside them are the curriculums of some better place, and Lance, Pidge, Hunk, take notes and swap. 

School doesn’t even register anymore. Perhaps it’s hard to focus on present conditions when one has their eyes set so far to the horizon. In eighth grade, Lance can spare no attention for shallow drama, or the jokes people crack about him behind his back. During lunch, Hunk explains to him what he didn’t understand in the first go. 

And the thing is— it’s hard. Lance is stressed. 

For Hunk and Pidge, it probably isn’t as hard. Lance knows that much of what Pidge is studying is extra, just because she wants to, or because she’s adding another little stitch to her safety net. Lance doesn’t have that kind of luxury. The text blurs in front of his gaze; bags appear under his eyes. Information slips like string through his brain. 

His family notices. “You look half-dead,” Veronica notes, all truth and no sympathy. 

“Yeah, your eyes are purple,” Marco adds. Lance glares at him— the kid is six, how does he know if Lance is stressed or not? “Mom says that’s what happens when you’re tired.” 

They’re eating dinner, some kind of army stew, and Lance’s mom doesn’t contribute to the conversation, but Lance knows she’s going to say something sooner or later. And she does. Pretty much everyone else has gone to bed and Lance is studying for his math test tomorrow when she silently appears by his side. 

“ _ Mijo _ ,” she says. “Why are you so tired? Why are you working yourself so hard?” 

Lance bites his lip. “Because I want to go to Garrison.” 

Veronica and Luis both go to the high school in their district, and it would be expected that Lance would follow them. It’s easier. Only a quarter of an hour away, and it wouldn’t wear Lance down so much. He feels like stone, rubbed raw by the tide. His mom’s brows knit together. 

“You don’t have to go, you know,” she says. “I’m proud of you. It doesn’t matter too much if you don’t make it in.” 

“I  _ have  _ to,” Lance finds himself saying, and that’s when he realizes how true his dream is. 

“Your grades have gotten so good, even if you don’t make it, you’ve improved so much.” But then his mom stops, realizes that this isn’t what it’s about at all. “It’s about that girl, Pidge, right? You’d follow her to the end of the world.” 

Lance swallows. It isn’t completely about Pidge, either. He’s got this need to prove himself that burns deep in his bones, but Pidge is definitely a side reason. “Yeah.” 

His mom is silent for a moment. “Lance…  _ la quieres _ ?” 

“Geez,  _ no _ ,” Lance says, voice rising. In love with Pidge? That’s laughable. He didn’t want to marry her when he was five, and he certainly doesn’t want to now. He kind of wishes he did, though. His mom would approve of that more than what he… he doesn’t want to think about it, with Garrison so occupying his thoughts. “It’s just, she knows what she’s doing.” 

It’s true. Pidge seems to belong to some sort of brighter future, even if it looks strange in the right now. His mom just sighs, standing up and leaving him alone. He turns his attention back to Coran’s daughter’s old textbook.  _ If y is this and x is that, then the slope is…  _

\---

The test is in March. The cost of taking it is ten dollars, a little more if one counts the cost of the Subway to the testing center, which isn’t the school but rather a lonely building in the middle of nowhere. 

Hunk squeezes his shoulder, and even Pidge, so usually reserved, gives him a thin, bird-boned nudge and whispers, “Good luck.”

The testing center is sterile, the booklet shiny and thick. Lance breaks the seal when the instructor tells him to and starts. His throat is dry. Focus on the problem. His attention is a fragile thing, but Lance begs himself to hold out just this one time. The first section is reading. His eyes rove over the page, sentence by sentence. 

There’s a ten minute break between the second and third sections. Lance puts his head down for it, eyes heavy. By the time the fourth section rolls around— science— he can feel his resolve crumbling. The last four questions he leaves blank, having run out of time. 

“We’re done,” Hunk says, hoarse, on the way back on the Subway. It isn’t cold, but he’s got his arms wrapped around himself. “I thought that thing would never end.” 

“I got the opposite problem, buddy, I was crunched for time,” Lance laughs, trying to make light of it, although it sounds ashen. “Man, that was so boring. How were any of us supposed to pay attention? Pidge, you get me, right?” 

Pidge’s face is unreadable. “Yeah,” she says. Lance knows the test must not have been that hard for her. “We’re done with it now. All we have to do is wait.” 

Results come in June. The wait actually isn’t so bad. The eyebags under Lance’s eyes disappear  because he no longer has to study so much. And they can talk about other things at lunch now, like how Coran makes cakes that taste like rocks or how Hunk is totally going to  _ kill  _ that boy who wants to date his younger sister. 

Lance laughs, because he can’t picture Hunk killing anyone, but he wouldn’t want to be that boy all the same. 

Sometimes, though, he’ll remember that he took the test, and a cold wave of dread will wash over him. He’s helpless now. There’s nothing he can do. Maybe his test has already been graded, his application read. Maybe the scorers are shaking their heads and writing his address across a rejection letter,  _ Lance McClain, we regret to inform you…  _

He has a nightmare where both Hunk and Pidge get in, and he doesn’t, and they scoff at him and say, “Did you really think you could come with us?” 

Eventually, June rolls around, and it’s just long enough that Lance has almost forgotten about the whole affair. The sun is warm on his shoulders when Pidge comes sprinting down the roadway, banging on the doorway with such force that Lance thinks, for a panicked second, that their house has been struck by lightning. 

When he opens it, she gasps, “It’s here,” and suddenly, Lance  _ knows  _ what this is about. 

“Did you make it in?” Lance demands. 

“You think I’d check without you? Split, don’t make me wait any longer.” 

Lance sprints over to the mailbox and pulls the envelope out with trembling hands. Even the envelope is fancy, Lance’s address written in black ink across a manila envelope, the logo stamped in gold. Would a rejection letter be this thick? He barely has time to wonder before his hands seem to move of their own accord and tear it open. 

_ Lance McClain, we are glad to inform you…  _

\---

Pidge remembers that moment when she and Lance had been accepted. That brilliant, dazzling moment of happiness, where she felt like nothing could go wrong. Looking back at it, she tries to summon that warmth back, and finds herself failing. There’s only a small tendril of light in the dark. 

She’d immediately written to Matt and her Dad about getting accepted. The letter had never been returned. Instead, she gets a report reporting that Matthew and Samuel Holt are MIA. Who knows where they are? It only states in vague words that they are somewhere in Vietnam, after an operation, code-named Kerberos, had gone amiss. 

Pidge doesn’t cry this time. Instead, the dread just trickles down all the way to her feet, rooting her to the ground; next to her, her mother’s face ages twenty years in one second, looking at the blocky, uncaring text. And suddenly the last place Pidge wants to go is Garrison. She wants to go over to Vietnam and search for them. She wants to be there with them, wherever they are. 

Her dreams are cruel. She dreams of being encircled in her father’s arms— “Sorry for worrying you, Pidge,” he says; behind him, Matt smiles mischievously. “Got you. Did you think we’d really leave?” 

There is, of course, the question of whether they’re dead or not. It’s a question Pidge both desperately wants to know the answer to and doesn’t all at once, but it isn’t her choice. She can’t just plug them into an equation and solve. Instead, she has to go by gut feeling. 

“I think they’re alive,” she whispers to herself. She doesn’t say this to her mom— Pidge feels that would just make her sadder. And Pidge, although she’s never relied on anything but the sciences, just has to trust herself on this one. “I’d feel it if they were dead.” 

She pieces the shreds of herself back together. She can’t let this take her apart— Matt would be horrified if she did, her father furious. But the world, so bright in June, has gone to monochrome. The sun isn’t even warm anymore. At least her mom is there, and Lance. 

“One day, they’ll come back,” Lance mumbles, face ashen. “If not, we’ll find them.” 

\---

She gets her uniform and schedule in August. It’s nice— a white blouse with a blue collar, and a white and blue checkered skirt. It’s starchy and uncomfortable, but that’s fine. 

One is supposed to wear white socks and black shoes, self-bought. Stubbornly, she wears Matt’s old loafers; they’re a little too big and it makes her mom sigh, but she refuses to put on anything else. 

Her new schedule sacrifices sleep for learning. Pidge has to wake up at five to catch the Subway with Lance; it’s an hour and a half’s ride there. Garrison is even more prodigious than in Matt’s descriptions. Lance is jittery with nerves; his shoes are equally as wrecked as hers. 

“It’ll be  _ fine _ , Lance,” she snaps, annoyed, her own anxiety making her tongue sharper than usual. “You made it in, didn’t you?” 

“Just cause I made it doesn’t mean I’ll survive it,” Lance retorts, but he seems to forcibly calm himself down somewhat after that. “Actually, you know what? I will. It’ll take more than a fancy school to kill me.” 

It’s more than a fancy school, though. Garrison High is even more imposing than Matt had described it. It’s a tall, sprawling brick building, girls and boys wearing perfectly pressed uniforms, laughing and chattering as they head through the doors. Pidge can pick out who the freshmen are by the nervous looks on their faces, the poor kids by their shoes. 

When she walks to her first class, biology, she feels her numbness and grief replaced by determination. 

All new lab equipment line the counters, and the textbooks at the front of the class are in prime condition, duplicates of Coran’s daughter’s. The desks are shiny wood, nothing doodled on their surfaces. The teacher, a man with gray hair and glasses sitting on his nose, commands their attention immediately, voice soft yet authoritative. 

Pidge could learn to become a scientist here. 

“Under no circumstances are you to touch the lab equipment without permission,” the teacher says, and here, the his soft voice is laced with threat. “Unless you want to suffer consequences.” 

She is issued a textbook, as in most of her other classes. All the rest of her classes are shiny, too. Her backpack bulges under the weight, and Pidge prays the straps don’t rip as she makes her way through the hallways. She has two classes with Hunk, English and Math; with Lance, history. They all have the same lunch block. 

Walking into the cafeteria is when anxiety truly floods her. Everyone else has already found their group, but where are Lance and Hunk? She hadn’t even gotten to talk to them in class. 

“Hey! Hey, Pidge! Over here!” someone yells. She whips around, and a few feet from her is Hunk, waving enthusiastically. 

“Rad, you’re here!” Lance says, nearly dragging Pidge over. “We were looking  _ all over  _ the place for you, we thought you’d gotten trampled over by the seniors—” 

“Chill out, I’m not that short,” Pidge grumbles, mood lifted immediately. “And watch the bag. I think it’s gonna split any moment.” 

“That’s too real. I think my bag weighs more than me, at this point,” Lance mourns. “Anyway, how was your morning? Two minutes in and I think my math teacher hates me  _ already _ .” 

“Iverson?” Normally, Pidge would be all for mocking Lance’s drama, but something about Iverson had given her the creeps, too. She remembers Matt saying he hadn’t liked him either. “I feel that.” 

Garrison isn’t anything like their middle school. As she continues her routine— wake up at five, come to school, try and complete her homework, fall asleep, exhausted— she begins to see why the school had been so hard to get into. Here, she feels the burn. Some of the questions in math stump her. And this place is so  _ shiny _ — all the kids who aren’t on scholarship are so rich. 

But she doesn’t need money to hold her own. 

\---

In biology, Pidge’s assigned labmate is a boy named Keith. And Keith is rather something of an enigma. 

He’s got eyes so black that Pidge sometimes think they’re purple, and they’re usually set in a cold, menacing stare that Pidge tries not to let herself be intimidated by. Sometimes, he shows up to school bruised— knuckles split, wrist splotched purple. When he answers questions, his voice is sharp. 

But when Pidge had introduced herself, Keith had said, “Pidge? That’s a cool name.” 

That isn’t  _ anything  _ that Pidge has heard before— all her life, her nickname has been the subject of mockery and doubt— and she’s taken aback. For a second, Matt’s face superimposes itself over Keith’s, despite the fact they look nothing alike, before she jerks herself back to reality. 

“Oh. Um, thank you.” 

They make, surprisingly, a good team. Keith might show up to school with bruises and have the world’s most off-putting gaze, but he doesn’t patronize her. And he’s not lazy, like some people she’s worked with. He seems to have a hunger for information as great as her own. 

“I think that’s the nucleus,” Pidge says, as they hunch over a microscope together. 

She thinks microscopes are, paradoxically, exactly like telescopes in a way. When she looks at the plant leaf, she sees a tiny universe, the cells like individual galaxies, the nucleuses like stars. Keith is drawing what they see, strokes deft and quick— she is lucky to have been put with someone who is so talented at sketching. 

“Okay. And that’s the cell wall,” Keith says, labeling it accordingly. “What else we’ve got? Chloroplasts?” 

“Yeah. I think you can just point to any of those green things.” 

“It’s kinda like a house,” Keith murmurs, and when Pidge looks at him questionably, he adds, with what may be the beginnings of a blush on his face, “the cells look like green bricks.” 

It evolves from teamwork to a hesitant friendship two weeks in. What Pidge likes is that Keith doesn’t push. To be honest, if she’d met Lance later in life, she might not have befriended him— he’s loud, and obnoxious, and certain events in her life have closed her off to possible intruders. Keith never makes it a statement that he wants to be friends with her, just that he wants to finish the assignment and get a good grade. 

It is, however, when they dissect a frog that Pidge really stops being intimidated by him. 

“Can you cut it?” Keith asks, amidst the class’s differing reactions of  _ cool  _ and  _ gross.  _ He’s not shivering with fear or anything, but he’s eying the dead specimen with something paler than distaste. “I’ll sketch.” 

“No problem.” Pidge takes the scalpel and makes a clean cut down the trachea, forcing the two halves apart. The jumbled mess of organs look alien. “There we go.” 

“Yeah,” Keith coughs. “There we go.” And then, as he’s finishing sketching the organs, “Do you think it hurt them? When they, you know…” 

“I think it was fine,” Pidge says, who’s unabashedly examining the organs. They feel squishy. Interesting. Keith’s sketch is detailed as always, but shakier than usual. “Man, all this stuff is so much less colorful than the diagrams.” 

“Yeah. Definitely.” Keith shakes his head, staring off into space. 

Pidge asks, cautious, “You good, Keith?”  

“I had a pet frog once,” he says quietly. “When I was younger.” 

“We have a dog.” Bae Bae is getting old, though. He might die soon. Here, she wishes the rules of science didn’t apply. “You like animals?” 

“Better than people.” 

Pidge barks out a surprised laugh, drawing the attention of some of her classmates, which immediately causes her face to flush. She looks down, gripping her pencil, and starts trying to label the mess. “Sorry. Just, that’s too real.” And then adds, almost not of her own will, “Hey, so, you wanna sit with my friends at lunch today?” 

The scalpel, which Keith had been hesitantly scrutinizing, clatters to the floor. “Uh, you wouldn’t mind?” 

“No.” 

So when Pidge gets out of math, she scans the hallway for Keith. She’s learned to navigate the school now, and catches up to Keith when she spots the hair, falling into step beside him. 

“We sit in the corner,” she says. Far away from the main crowd; they’re kind of lame. She wonders where Keith usually sits. 

“Alright.” And if Pidge knew him better, she’d hear the subtle anxiety in his voice. 

Lance and Hunk are already at lunch. Hunk, to Pidge’s lack of surprise, looks extraordinarily intimidated by Keith, who tends to have this effect. “Hey, Pidge,” he says nervously. “Who’s this?” 

“This is Keith. He’s in my biology class, he’s pretty decent,” Pidge says. 

When Pidge looks over, Keith’s expression is one of extreme awkwardness. “Hey. Who are you guys?” 

Hunk says, “I’m Hunk.” 

Lance says, “Do you not know me?” To Pidge’s surprise, Lance’s tone is sharp; his gaze, even more so. Unnaturally so. “I’m in your math class.” 

“Uh, yeah, I’m bad with names,” Keith says. “Who are you?” 

Lance’s eyes narrow; his voice is even more antagonistic when he next speaks. “I’m  _ Lance _ . I sit right next to you.” 

He takes a bite out of his sandwich like it’d murdered his family. 

“O…kay,” Keith says, and hesitantly sits down. Pidge had not expected this, to be honest. 

Hunk, still afraid, talks like he needs to compensate for Lance’s weird behavior. “Hey, so, my mom works at a bakery, and sometimes I get to mess with her leftovers,” he rambles. “Do you want to try some of my cookies? They’re peanut butter.” 

This, Pidge can get aboard. “What the heck? Why didn’t you tell me?” Pidge demands, reaching a hand out. 

Hunk rolls his eyes. “I was  _ gonna _ ,” he says, and drops one into Pidge’s waiting hand. “... Keith?” 

“Uh, yeah, sure,” Keith says. He takes one, takes a bite. “Whoa, this is really good.” 

Hunk’s expression relaxes. “Thanks.” 

“He’s a genius with cookies,” Pidge chimes in. “He’ll take over the world someday with them.” 

Lance says nothing, glowering at his sandwich. Pidge doesn’t understand what his  _ deal  _ is— maybe he’s just in a weird mood today? 

At the end of lunch, Keith asks if he can sit there again tomorrow, which is honestly surprising, given the air of awkwardness that Lance had created. But Pidge says yes, and Hunk says yes, and after an agonizingly long period of time, Lance says yes too. Keith seems immune to Lance’s strange behavior. Pidge collects this piece of information and stores it away. 

Keith might feel sympathy for a dead frog, but that didn’t mean he’d care if another human hated him. 

\---

Lance might not have spoken that first time that Keith had sat there, but after that, he doesn’t stop talking. 

Keith quickly goes from indifferent to his presence to  _ annoyed _ ; and if Lance is being honest, he feels a sick sort of pleasure whenever he can tell that he’s gotten some sort of rise out of Keith. 

“You have a  _ mullet _ ?” Lance asks, scathing. 

Keith stares at him with those cold, purple-black eyes. “Yes. Is that a crime?” 

“Yeah— who are you, John Lennon?” 

After that, he calls Keith Mullet, refusing to address him by his actual name. 

But Keith keeps sitting there, getting along with Pidge and Hunk, despite the fact Lance does everything possible to push him away. Lance doesn’t get why Hunk likes him— Hunk is one of the nicest, most generous people on the planet, and he’s befriended some kid who doesn’t even deign to recognize someone who sits  _ right next to them  _ in math class. 

“Man, what is your  _ deal _ with Keith?” Pidge asks frustratedly, one day on the Subway. “Why do you hate him so much?” 

“I don’t hate him.” 

“Could’ve fooled me.” 

Reluctantly, Lance explains, because he can’t keep things from Pidge. After he’s finished, Pidge is silent for a long time, then says, “That… is  _ really  _ stupid.” 

And maybe it is, a little. But something about Keith just gets under his skin. Keith is top of their math class, and he doesn’t even seem to try. He just shows up with that impassive gaze of his and scores one-hundreds on tests. 

Meanwhile, Lance is struggling to claw his way through the mess of decimals and graphs. Advanced Geometry is difficult. Along with numbers are a platoon of letters that he has to deal with. He’d gotten a forty-seven on the first test. And even worse, Mr. Iverson seems to have it  _ out  _ for him. 

“Lance McClain?” Mr. Iverson had said to him, at the end of the test. “I recognize that name. You were the last person they accepted for scholarship, and it was because one kid dropped out.” Lance had exited the classroom with his cheeks burning and tears threatening to fall out of his eyes. The next test, he’d pulled an all-nighter and gotten an eighty-five. 

Meanwhile, Keith doesn’t even acknowledge his presence in class. And Lance  _ hates  _ being ignored. 

At Garrison, he establishes himself as something of a class clown. Maybe people are laughing  _ at  _ him instead of with him in some of instances, but at least they’re looking, and at least they’re laughing. He flirts outrageously with the prettiest girls there, all of whom roll their eyes. 

So the fact Keith hadn’t known his name caused something to snap, and here he is now. Being a total jerk. 

It goes on for about a month before Keith leaves his textbook at school. Math class is Lance’s last period, and they might not be friends, but the cost of the textbook is high, and the homework is impossible to complete without it. Lance takes the textbook, weighs it in his hands, before deciding that maybe he should try and be a nice person. 

“Catch you later!” he yells to Pidge on the way out, autumn leaves swirling in the wind. “I gotta split.” 

He’ll take the Subway fifteen minutes after. 

Keith walks the opposite direction to the Subway. Lance knows this because the mullet is recognizable, and for some inexplicable reason, he finds his gaze drawn to it every single time. He walks in the general direction and— 

Oh God. 

Keith is on the ground, holding his side. It’s a secluded little corner a little away from Garrison, and blood is spilling from Keith’s split knuckles onto the sidewalk and Lance wants to throw up at the sight. His fingers go limp around the textbook; his own face must be white. Keith’s expression is resigned, a little pained. 

And then he spots Lance. 

“What?” Keith spits. “What, you here to call me more names? What is it? Orphan? Mongrel? Bastard? Fag?” He gets up, advances on Lance. “Cause trust me, I’ve heard them  _ all _ . And I’m not afraid to give it another go.” 

Lance feels sick. “No. You just— you left your textbook in class. I thought I’d give it to you.” 

Mullet seems like an  _ extraordinarily  _ lame insult compared to all that other stuff now. Keith looks at the textbook, looks back at Lance, swallows hard. The fire in his eyes go out, defeated. 

“Well, thanks. I guess.” 

“We gotta clean you up,” Lance says. 

And here, Keith glowers. “It’s  _ fine _ —” 

“No, your hands are going to get infected,” Lance snaps. He knows that. He’s had to wipe down Marco’s wounds too many times so many times that the mothering is second nature. “Come on. The back door of the Garrison is open.” 

“How do you know—” 

“I’ve stayed behind to get help before,” Lance mumbles, trying to blur the words together so Keith won’t register them. “The janitor’s chill with this stuff, let’s go.” 

Surprisingly, Keith follows. It almost scares Lance, Keith’s compliance. Lance pushes open the doors, walks into the Garrison, so unbelievably shiny. Even the bathroom is clean. The two of them go in, and Keith is silent as he turns the sink on and sticks his hands under them. Lance won’t aide him in that; he figures he’s intruded enough. 

“Where’d they get you?” Lance asks, once Keith has finished washing his hands and is drying them on a paper towel, white paper going pink. 

“My ribs. Not my face, at least,” Keith answers shortly. “They took most of the hits.” 

And Lance should  _ really  _ leave it that, but he can’t help asking, “Why’d do that?” 

Keith sighs. “You really don’t know why?” he says. “Cause they don’t like me. They see some half-Chinese orphan bastard who, on top of being half-Chinese and an orphan bastard, manages to also beat them out in school. It’s okay, though. They realize I’m not weak soon enough.” 

Lance doesn’t know what to say. 

“Why’d you care, anyway?” Keith asks. “You hate me, too.” 

“I don’t hate you,” Lance says. Keith gives him a dry look, like,  _ you’re just saying that because I spilled my sob story to you _ . “I was mad you didn’t know my name.” 

“Well. Now I know your name. Lance.” They stare at each other for a second before Keith’s face hardens, slipping his mask back on. “Thanks for the textbook. I’m gonna split now. Shiro will wonder where I am, and this bathroom’s gross.” 

Lance pees, because the terror went straight to his bladder, then exits the bathroom as well and takes the Subway home. 

The next day at lunch, Lance says, “Hey, Mullet,” and it lacks any of its usual edge. 

Pidge notices the difference in tone, if the sharp turn of her head means anything, but she doesn’t comment on it. And Keith and Lance’s back-and-forth continues to lack any of its usual fire throughout the lunch. 

Later, on the Subway, Pidge asks what happens, and Lance says, “Eh. I guess he’s just not that bad.” 

He might tell Pidge everything, but unfortunately, this isn’t his story to tell. Fortunately, Pidge doesn’t question it, just says, “That’s good.” 

Looking back, Lance has to admit that it makes lunch more enjoyable when he doesn’t have to spend energy hating a member of their table. Keith and Lance are certainly still not nice to each other. Keith is nice to Hunk, and he’s nice to Pidge, but when he and Lance speak, it’s almost always sharp. And that’s fine; they’ve traded out their steel swords for wooden ones. 

\---

In February, Pidge comes to lunch with a desolate expression on her face. “Our radio broke,” she sighs. Lance winces. “Any of you know anything about radios?” 

“That’s a bummer,” Keith says, sympathetic. “I wish I did, but I don’t… wait, but Shi—” 

“We should build one,” Hunk interjects excitedly. 

Keith stops talking, and all of them look at Hunk, who shrinks a little under the attention, but manages to hold his ground nonetheless. “Remember when we made that toy car in seventh grade?” Hunk asks. “It was so fun!” 

“That was a  _ toy car _ ,” Pidge says, but her eyes are already flashing, the wheels in her brain starting to spin. “You think we can pull off a radio?” 

“Don’t see why not,” Hunk says. “The Garrison library’s huge. We shouldn’t have any problem finding something about radios in it.” 

“You guys built a toy car together in seventh grade?” Keith asks, and his tone is not in its usual impassive state. It sounds impressed. Maybe a little envious. “Can I help with your radio?” 

“The Great Keith Mullet Kogane, asking to assist  _ us _ ?” Lance mocks, and Keith glares. Lance shrugs. “Well, yeah, of course. All hands on deck. I don’t know anything about engineering and I helped them last time.” 

Keith stops glaring. “I don’t know anything about radios, but my guardian does.” And Lance notes the careful use of the word  _ guardian _ . Not Mom. Dad. He remembers what Keith said about being an orphan. 

“Guardian?” Hunk questions, careful.

“Yeah. I’m adopted.” 

There’s a pause there, Keith’s eyes narrowing like he’s daring anyone to say something about that. Nobody does. 

“So we could build it over at my place. I live close to the school,” Keith adds, after the air clears. His eyes rounden, like he can’t believe he just offered that, but it’s too late— Pidge and Hunk have officially latched onto the idea. 

“Dude, far out!” Hunk says. 

Keith swallows. Looks down. “Ask your parents, though. I don’t want you to get on trouble or anything on my behalf.” 

Lance grins. “Aw, you do care about us.” 

“Not about you.” To this, Lance crosses his arms, sticks his tongue out. And here— he misses the look that flashes over Pidge’s face. A very dangerous look. The look that means she’s seeing something no one else is seeing. 

Two days later, the three of them head over to Keith’s house. And Keith is— nervous. His hands keep clenching and unclenching, like he can somehow expel the stress if he just cracks his knuckles hard enough. Lance winces when his bones audibly pop. 

And when they get to his home, Lance immediately understands why. 

It’s nothing about the house itself. Keith’s house is the size of Lance and Pidge’s combined; to Lance, it’s almost a castle. Like Garrison, it’s shiny, and Lance is about to tease Keith for being a neat freak when a voice says, “Keith, are these your friends from school?” 

A man shuffles out of the kitchen. Lance can’t tell how old he is— he’s built like he’s twenty-five, has the template of a face that a twenty-five year old might have, but it’s like someone had decided to give him the individual features of someone much older. He has a shock of white hair atop his head and eyes so old it’s like they’ve seen an entire century. And— his  _ arm _ . Or rather, lack thereof. 

On the man’s right side is only a stump where a full limb should be. 

“Uh, yeah,” Keith says, bumbling, and Lance tears his eyes away from the man’s shoulder. Keith’s voice is shyer than Lance has ever heard it. “That’s Hunk, Lance, Pidge. Pidge’s radio broke, and you know, I told you…”  

“Pleased to meet you,” the man says, mouth quirking up in a wan smile. “Glad to know Keith’s in good company.”  

Keith looks embarrassed as hell. 

Suddenly, the man’s eyes shift, clouding over and staring straight at Pidge. “You wouldn’t…” he says softly. “You wouldn’t happen to have… an older brother…” 

Lance’s mouth falls open. He looks at Pidge, who’s standing there, frozen. “You’re Shiro,” she chokes. “You— Matt told me about you. In his letters.” 

“Yeah, that’s me.”

Time stands still. “Do you— would you happen to know where he is?” Pidge asks. “He told me that you were sent home after you lost your arm, but maybe you’d…” 

“I know no more than you do. I wish I could tell you.” 

Lance should not be here. None of them should be here, except Pidge and Shiro, who both look so lost, two travelers meeting each other in the maze of their shared grief. Ceasefire in Vietnam has been declared, Lance knows, and yet Matt and Pidge’s father remain missing. 

The goal of making a radio has been completely forgotten. Pidge tears her gaze away from Shiro’s and fixes it on the floor. 

“Well. It’s nice to meet you,” she mumbles. 

“Yeah. That was quite an introduction,” Shiro says, his comment the understatement of the century. 

Hunk shuffles his feet. Out of all of them, Hunk’s probably most out of his depth, since he knows neither Matt or Shiro. “You have a really nice kitchen,” he blurts out, then promptly looks like he wishes he could melt into the really nice kitchen tiles. “Sorry.” 

“No, thank you,” Shiro says. “Anything particularly nice about it?” 

Hunk’s face flushes crimson. “It’s… spacious.” 

“Hunk’s a baker,” Lance explains, just so he can shove his foot in his mouth, too. 

Hunk’s words help dissipate some of the electricity in the air, though, and for that, Lance is relieved. 

Afterward, Pidge apologizes, saying she doesn’t think she’s got the focus for building a radio from scratch today, and Keith says,  _ me too _ . So Shiro tells Hunk that he’s got free reign of the kitchen if he wishes, Hunk lights up and starts taking ingredients out, and Lance, Keith, and Pidge sit around and pretend to study. 

As soon as Shiro is presumably out of earshot— eventually, he leaves them to their own devices— Pidge says, “That was strange.”  

“I don’t _ get  _ it,” Lance says, as Hunk mumbles something about high-quality flour. “Sorry if this is impolite—” 

Keith rolls his eyes. “You’re  _ always  _ impolite.” 

“Sorry if this is impolite,” Lance says pointedly,“but how’d  _ this _ whole thing even happen?” 

“I don’t know. Our lives must be a TV show,” Keith deadpans. “Hey, how’d you guys do problem number seven, by the way?” 

Lance isn’t stupid, knows an obvious out when he sees one. He supposes that the connection that binds Shiro, Pidge, and Keith together will have to remain a mystery for the time being. It’s like the world’s worst itch, but he wills himself not to scratch it. It isn’t his place to ask. 

The afternoon’s nice, anyway. 

Hunk finishes up the cookies, and Shiro re-appears, claiming his house has never smelled so good. Sunlight streams through the windows, painting the whole place with a butter-yellow glow. The five of them cram themselves around the table and eat, and Lance thinks that despite the fact the situation is so complicated, this is the simplest feeling of happiness he’s felt in a long time. 

\---

When it comes finals season at Garrison, Pidge finds herself remembering those late hours in eighth grade, hunched over a textbook. 

Lance puts it, “I can’t believe we spent so many hours studying to get into Garrison High so we could study more hours at Garrison High.” 

It’s two weeks before the actual finals that she and Lance decide to call it quits for the night, and head outside into the warm May night. 

It’s one of those days where it’s just her and Lance; they live a block away from each other, after all, and no matter how close she and Hunk are or how frequent her visits to Keith’s place are getting, nothing will ever erase the fact that she and Lance have known each other for almost a decade. 

Pidge has started the radio, with the help of Garrison’s enormous library (with all the blueprints there, it almost takes the fun out of struggling) and Shiro’s expertise. The man is good with radios, and Pidge has a feeling it’s got to do with Vietnam. 

Pidge knows she is bound to Shiro, finds a kind of comfort in his company, and yet she feels a deep sense of terror whenever she wonders what’s behind his eyes, because Shiro’s body seems to be a haunt for demons. On the surface, Shiro is a man of smooth conversation and great intellect, but underneath it is something much darker. 

“He saw some things in Vietnam,” Keith tells her, and leaves it at that. 

Pidge wonders if he’s told that to Lance, too. She’s noticed a shift in their relationship, and she has her suspicions. Meanwhile—

“We should make a wish,” Lance says, gesturing to the night sky, black fabric sprinkled with stars. 

“What are you gonna wish for?” Pidge asks. And then, to test her theory, “Keith?” 

“What? Why’d I wish for him?” Lance squawks, face flushing. “I was thinking more along the lines of good grades for our finals, not Keith Mullet Kogane.” 

Pidge hums, staring upward. She doesn’t want to make her wish, because it’s so far out it can’t possibly come true: a world where she can be a girl and a scientist at the same time, a world where her father and Matt aren’t stuck inside the web of a never ending war, a world where Lance isn’t so afraid to be himself. And so she just stares at the glowing pinpricks, blazing balls of fire light years away. 

\---

Lance claims his wish works, since Pidge, Lance, Hunk, and Keith all walk out of finals with passing grades. “I got an eighty-two on math,” Lance crows. “Who’s the man? I’m the man.” 

The rest of the lunch table stare at him with looks of amusement, Pidge included. “What?” Lance says, voice defensive. “I know the rest of you all did better, but—” 

“No,” Keith cuts in, effectively shutting Lance up. “Good job.” 

Pidge doesn’t really have issue with finals, getting above ninety on every subject, even history. She supposes it’s the result of all that studying. 

Summer seems empty without the weight of school, but Pidge decides it’s fine, that’s nice. She can hang out with Lance, work on the radio, ride the bike that she found in the junkyard and fixed up. Who throws out a whole bicycle, anyway? 

It’s June, and her hair is sweaty when she gets home from one of these bike rides. After she shuts the door, she turns around to find her mother sitting on the couch with a letter in hand and tears streaming down her face. 

“Mom?” Pidge asks, alarmed. “What happened?” 

Her mother doesn’t answer with words, just shoves the letter into Pidge’s hands. Pidge has to read it several times before the message sinks in, and it’s very short, but Pidge feels a thousand pounds lighter, a block of lead she didn’t even know she’d been carrying lifted off her shoulders. 

“Matt’s been found?” Pidge asks, nearly dropping the letter. “He’s coming home?” 

“Next week,” her mom says, still crying 

“Why are you  _ crying _ , then?” Pidge asks, disbelieving.

She knows that they’re happy tears. But Pidge’s relief is so sharp, her smile so wide, that the concept of tears seem unfathomable at the moment. “I thought something bad had happened! But Matt’s been found! Matt’s coming  _ home _ ! Matt!” 

Her mom just cries harder. “My son,” she whispers. “Thank God.” 

Pidge tears out of the house and down the street to tell Lance, who yanks her into a hug so tight it nearly breaks her ribcage. She feels like she’s floating. 

However, euphoria can’t last forever, and Pidge is slightly relieved when she touches down to earth. The happiness is still there, but Pidge’s tendency to analyze everything and anything is back, too. 

Although of course the letter had said that Matt had been found, that he was coming back, a little part of Pidge can’t help but wish that Samuel Holt’s name was on there as well. This is an instance where math doesn’t work so perfectly— having Matt home doesn’t make their family fifty percent more complete. It will always be incomplete without their father. 

A piece does not make the whole. But Pidge is glad to have that piece back. 

She also wonders about how to break the news to Shiro. She doesn’t see Keith that much over the summer, unfortunately— taking the underground one and a half hours to visit is cumbersome, to say the least— but Shiro has to know. Eventually, Pidge decides that she’ll put off this thought until Matt’s actually back. 

The night before the date on the letter, Pidge can’t sleep. She looks anxiously out the window every five minutes. And yet she  _ still  _ manages to be caught off guard by the knock on the door. Somehow, her mother beats her to opening it, flinging it open. 

And it’s Matt. In the flesh. Her brother. Pidge can’t move. She just stands there limply, limbs frozen, unable to believe he’s real. 

He’s aged far past the four years he’s supposed to. He hasn’t lost an arm, and his hair is still brown, but his eyes are old, and permanent lines are etched on his face. But it’s still Matt. 

Then Pidge regains her ability to speak, and says, “Hey.” 

She’d never have been able to predict how  _ awkward  _ this is. The best kind of awkward, but awkward nonetheless. How can she possibly make up for a missing four years with a single conversation? 

“Pidge,” Matt says. “Mom.” 

He hugs their mother first, who looks like she’s about to burst into tears again, and then Pidge. Matt’s hug is soft and warm, embrace tight but not rib-crushing. Pidge almost crumbles right then and there, but the tears stay down. 

She steps back, says softly, “I missed you.” 

“Missed you too, little sis,” he says. “I was going to write you guys as soon as I made it out, but I guess the government beat me to it.” 

“What happened?” their mom demands, and that’s a question that Pidge can get aboard. She’s wanted answers for an entire year. 

“A plan went very, very wrong,” Matt says, smiling sadly. “Our commander wasn’t there to help us execute it, either, because he’d left months ago due to injury—” Pidge realizes this is in reference to Shiro and his arm “—and Dad and I were taken prisoner. I was only just released. I managed to make my way back, but Dad… I don’t know what happened to him.”

There’s an ugly lump in Pidge’s throat. “Well, you’re here now,” she manages to say. “You had us so  _ worried _ .” 

“I know. I’m sorry.” And it’s such a Matt thing to do, to try and apologize for a whole war beyond his control. “But you seem to have gotten about. Heard you got into the Garrison, Pidge— it’s easy for you, right?” 

“Shut  _ up _ ,” Pidge chokes. “Shut up.” 

Yes, she’s gotten by, but it’s been such a lonely getting; her chest had felt at night. But she doesn’t know how to express that, so all she gets is a rebuking stare from her mother. 

“Pidge!” 

“It’s alright,” Matt says, a wan smile on his face. “I think I get where she’s coming from.” 

Their mom shakes her head. “You two have always been so in sync,” she mutters, sighing, and collects herself as much as she can with tears running down her cheeks. “Are you hungry, Matt? Dinner’s about ready.” 

“Uh, yeah,” he says. “Dinner sounds good.” 

That night, Matt sleeps in their room, and Pidge dreams with her eyes buttoned in a smile. 

\---

Two days later, they take the Subway down to see Shiro. Pidge has tried to explain the scenario to Matt as best she can. 

“I  _ know  _ your commander,” she says, and Matt gapes. “Listen, I don’t know how it happened. It’s weird. But I’ve talked to a guy named Shiro with his right arm missing, and he asked me if I had an older brother.” 

“You’ve got to be kidding,” Matt says. “How is that even possible?” 

“I’m— I was bio partners with this kid in my school, and after awhile, we became friends.” At this, she trails off, noticing that Matt has a stupid smile on his face. “ _ What _ ?” 

“Nothing. Just nice to see you making friends.” 

“Yeah, whatever,” Pidge grumbles, embarrassed, and Matt laughs. “Anyway, he invited me over to his house, and Shiro lives there. I don’t know why, so don’t ask me. All I know is that Keith’s an orphan, and Shiro’s his current guardian. The details beyond that are kind of blurry. It was a crazy first meeting, though.”

“Sounds like it.” Matt shakes his head. “It’s a crazy world.” 

“Really is,” Pidge agrees. Matt’s hands are twitching in his lap, nervous. Pidge is kind of nervous as well, but also excited. She’s interested to see the events that will unfold. 

Once they’re off the Subway, Matt looks around in disbelief. “It’s so familiar,” he mumbles. 

Pidge realizes with a start that Matt had gone to Garrison four years ago. It feels like much longer, though; it might as well be a different world. 

They make their way over to Keith and Shiro’s neighborhood, and Matt takes a long look at the house, before hesitantly rapping on the front door. 

It’s not Shiro that opens it. It’s Keith. “Hey, Pidge,” he says. “What brings you—” 

Then he notices Matt. His mouth falls open. “Oh. Wow.” He glances nervously over at his shoulder. No sign of Shiro yet. “Um— you two look alike.”

Pidge thinks, they used to look even more alike when they were younger, when Matt didn’t have eyes two million years old. 

“Thanks,” Matt says. Then, “Nice to meet you, Keith.” 

“Uh, you too. Come in?” Keith says hesitantly, at loss for words. He slips inside the house, and Matt and Pidge silently follow. “I think Shiro’s upstairs… do you want me to call him down? Or do you want—” 

Turns out, it doesn’t matter what any of them want, because Shiro comes bursting down the stairs, saying, “Keith, I thought I heard a knock.” And then he sees Matt and Pidge, and just like Keith, his mouth falls open.

“You two really do look alike,” he whispers. 

The four of them square off, not saying anything for a long while. Strange how the war might have taken the whole world apart, and yet, even with the pieces in place, the hardest part is fitting them back together again. 

There’s a gentle smile on Matt’s face when he speaks. “You look like you’re doing well.” 

“I’m doing okay,” Shiro says, voice rough. “I’m— I’m so glad to know that you’re back. Even if some warning would have been nice.” Here, he shoots a pointed look at Keith. 

Keith puts his hands up, defensive. “I didn’t know  _ anything  _ about this.” 

There is no small talk that afternoon, because small talk is impossible with all the elephants in the room. Pidge shows Matt the radio she’s been working on— the guts of it are completely finished at this point. When Matt examines it, she can almost pretend that she’s five years old again. Almost. 

There are a couple of things to be learned that afternoon. 

The first is how Shiro’s and Keith’s coexistence came to be. They’d both been a bad state when they’d met each other— just how bad, Pidge can’t imagine— Keith being bounced around the foster care system and Shiro plagued by nightmares and the heavy weight of life after war. They’ve been living together for over a year now, and both have stabilized somewhat. 

The second is the question of what is to be done now. 

“You were quite famous among our unit, Pidge,” Shiro says. “You know how most soldiers have a lass back home they’re fighting for? Matt would always talk about his genius younger sister. We said you must have been quite a duo, since Matt’s so smart himself.” 

“I’m not that smart,” Matt immediately denies, embarrassed, even though he literally spent the afternoon going over the radio design with them, with analysis to rival Shiro’s. 

“You said you’d been planning to go to college before the war got in the way,” Shiro says. “Is that still your plan, now that the war is over for you?” 

_ For you _ . For some, it will never really end. 

Matt sighs, soft. “I don’t know,” he says tiredly. “It’s been four years. Everything’s all messed up now.” 

Pidge bites her lip. She thinks of their mother sewing, the stitches flowing seamlessly one to another, and wonders if their mother would possibly have an answer how to stitch the previous portion of Matt’s life to this current one. “You’re still plenty cut out for college,” she says. 

“Your sister’s right,” Shiro says. “You talked about wanting to be an engineer sometimes, and honestly, the world would be a better place if that were the case.” Matt is silent. “Is there something holding you back?” 

They all wait. Matt just shrugs. “I… don’t know.” 

“It’s hard,” Shiro says. “I lost my arm. I didn’t know what to do with my life after that. But the world keeps spinning… you have to figure out how to spin with it.” 

And Pidge thinks that maybe she’s smart, but she’s not the kind of wise that Shiro is; his wisdom was acquired at a steep price that Pidge can’t imagine paying. 

She and Matt take the Subway back home before it can get dark again, the air soft and warm, and Pidge says, “So, what about college?” 

Matt shuffles his feet. “Let’s ask mom.” 

Their mother says yes, and it’s her words that seal the deal. Matt might not know if this is the right path, but like Shiro said, the world keeps spinning; he needs to at least try to spin with it. He registers for classes at a nearby college; before, there’d been talk of Stanford, and MIT, but for now this is okay. This is better than okay. 

\---

Lance doesn’t know how it happened.

All he knows is that he’s in hot water, and that he can explain. Actually, he can’t. He is so incredulous that he allowed something like this to happen that he can only focus on trying to deal with the consequences. 

He blames it on Shiro. Someone needs to be blamed, someone who isn’t him. And so he picks Shiro. 

“Okay, so Pidge got her brother back, and Shiro got his friend back, and I got…a… cr… ” Lance can’t say it. Nearby, a brown mouse burrows into the earth. “Yeah, I don’t know.” He wonders if the mouse is burrowing its way down to hell, a sign of his future.

It really had started innocently enough, he thinks. At the end of freshman year, he’d started visiting Keith’s home with Pidge and Hunk, for radio-reasons and others. But he’d also come over a couple of times on his own, which is where the mistake occurred. 

The thing is, Lance  _ idolizes  _ Shiro, the kind of idolize Lance usually reserves for people he’ll only ever see on the silver screen. Except it’s a deeper kind of admiration, because Shiro is real. And it’s different with that he can  _ talk  _ to him, and Shiro won’t brush him off. 

The catch, of course, is that he lives with Keith. 

“I can’t believe you like my brother so much,” Keith says, voice dry. Lance is pleased. He  usually refers to Shiro as his guardian. “When you don’t like me.” 

“I like you plenty,” Lance retorts, lifting his chin, and he misses the flush that starts its way up Keith’s neck. “Just not at all.” 

Shiro seems to know everything about technology, and he’ll take the time to show Lance strange, bizarre pieces of equipment. A lot of it is navigation stuff. Star-trackers, compasses, telescopes. Lance absorbs it all. His mind is strange in the way that he has issue memorizing anything for class but retains every single bit of information when it comes to space. 

And the side effect, to seeing all this technology, to speaking with his hero, is that Shiro and Keith are a package deal. And the side effect of  _ that  _ side effect is that Lance realizes that maybe Keith is not that bad at all. 

“You’re taking astronomy in your third year?” Lance asks. 

“That’s the plan, yeah,” Keith says. At Lance’s surprise, he says dryly, “What, you think I could just live and hang with people who are crazy about space and not end up wanting to know more about it myself?” 

There’s a limited amount of seats in that class. Keith being there means more competition. But Lance chooses not to mention it, just says, “You’re lucky you’ve got all those telescopes in your house.” 

“Ah, yeah. I’m more interested in the travel, though,” Keith says. “It’s crazy, but I wanted to be an astronaut ever since I watched Neil Armstrong onscreen. They dragged out that old TV in the orphanage—” Keith’s mouth shapes awkwardly on the word, and Lance is careful not to let his expression change “And we saw the landing.”  

“I had a poster of Neil Armstrong,” Lance brags. And then, when Keith’s eyes widen, clarifies, “Well, only a third. It was Pidge’s dad who found it. Matt got the lower half of his face, Pidge got his right eye, and I got the left.” 

“Dang. You still got it?” 

“Uh, no. Gave it back to Pidge.” Keith’s eyebrows shoot up, and Lance shrugs uncomfortably. “I don’t know. I felt like it was hers, you know?” 

Keith’s eyebrows refuse to come down. “Doesn’t sound like you, but okay.” 

“What do you mean, doesn’t sound like me? I’m a good friend,” Lance sputters, and Keith snorts. Lance hastily switches the subject. “Anyway, I wanna be an astronaut too, so watch out. I’ll out-pilot you anyday.” 

“They need more than one person per rocket,” Keith retorts. “But I’d kill you if I were stuck in space with your annoying face for more than a day, so yeah,  _ you  _ better watch out. I’ll out-pilot  _ you  _ anyday.” 

Lance is about to shoot something back— they could argue like this  _ all  _ day, he knows— but surprisingly, he finds himself not wanting to get stuck in that cycle. 

Instead, he says, “Pidge wants to build rockets.” 

“Really?” Keith is nice when it comes to Pidge, says, “She’ll probably be really good at that.” 

And Lance is irritated, because Keith would never say something like that about  _ him _ , but then again, they annoy each other to death on a daily basis, so he supposes that’s fair enough. “When the two of us were younger, we’d always play this game called moon ball. Her dad made it up. We wanted to go to the moon even before we knew that was an option.” 

“Moon ball?” Keith leans forward. “How d’you play?” 

And that’s how they wind up outside, with a tree on the other side of the block they’ve deemed a moon and a ball that both of them are eying like it’ll disappear any second if they stop looking. “One, two, three,  _ start _ ,” Lance says, and they make a dash for the ball. 

He hasn’t played this in forever. He feels like he’s six again, maybe in the best way. 

Keith snags the ball first, but no way Lance is letting Keith win, even if he’s out of practice. He sprints in front of Keith, who grins and loops around him, and Lance thinks,  _ not on my watch _ , and throws his whole body forward, tackling Keith to the grass and wrestling with him for the ball. The ball ends up slipping through both of their hands, rolling a meter away, and Lance is about to spring for it when he feels hands on his forearms, locking him to the ground. 

“No, you don’t,” Keith grits out, and Lance suddenly feels his face flame. They’re in such a strange position right now, Keith’s eyes dark above his. All he’d have to do is lean down, and their mouths could touch. 

Lance yanks his arms out of Keith’s grip and pushes him off, getting to the ball first. 

In the end, Keith wins, and Lance is only a little bit outraged. Actually, that’s a lie— he accuses Keith of cheating and mutters, “Well, ex _ -cuse  _ me for not having muscles the size of Mars.” 

His heart won’t stop racing. 

\---

That was weird, but Lance doesn’t really think anything of it. No way would he develop a crush on Keith. Keith is his  _ rival _ . 

Yeah, no way would he develop a crush on Keith, who Lance is learning more and more about with every passing day. Keith lets slip things in conversation, and like facts about the moon, Lance’s brain is apparently good at retaining facts about Keith, too. 

His mother left when he was young, maybe back to China, maybe back to the stars, he doesn’t know. His father died when he was young. When Keith speaks of them, his voice goes quiet, gentle. 

No way would he develop on a crush on Keith, who, despite the fact he’d been bounced around from orphanage to orphanage and held mercy to the foster system for  _ years _ , wasn’t all hard lines, soft in some places that Lance would never expect. And no way would he develop a crush on Keith; they were too different, despite the fact they loved stars with the exact same fervor and had runaway tongues that could match the intensity of each other. 

When Lance finally realizes his own stupidity, it’s a completely mundane moment. 

Sometimes, he and Keith study together. As Lance has known for years, Pidge, while great on several aspects, has a fuse the length of a matchstick and can’t explain her own thought process to save her life, and Hunk, while he’s a great tutor, makes Lance feel a little stupid sometimes. 

It’s probably weird that he prefers Keith. But when Lance is doing homework with Keith, he never feels either patronized or attacked, because to Lance’s delight, Keith somewhat struggles as well. 

When Lance voices this thought, Keith raises an eyebrow. “What, you thought I just waltzed into Garrison every day and magically knew everything?” 

“That’s what it seemed like,” Lance defends. “But I should’ve known. You’ve got a mullet for brains.” 

“You  _ still  _ haven’t gotten tired of the mullet thing despite the fact we’re now sophomores and you’ve had a whole summer to tease me?” Keith asks, rolling his eyes, and Lance suddenly realizes, yeah, they’re  _ sophomores  _ now. Time has passed so fast. He feels like he’s known Keith his whole life. “I told you, that’s just how my hair  _ is _ .” 

“No way your hair just styles itself like that,” Lance says. 

“It’s called a hairstyle.” 

“It’s called looking  _ dumb _ ,” Lance retorts, although at this point, there’s minimal heat to his words, if any. “Anyway, how do you multiply the letters, again?” 

“Okay, so you have to multiply all four things,” Keith explains, drawing arrows, and Lance just raises his eyebrows. “Don’t shoot the messenger, I didn’t invent this stuff.” 

“No, no, keep drawing your arrows,” Lance says. “Maybe if you draw enough of this it’ll make some actual sense.” 

Keith really is good at math, though. And like Hunk, his explanations, concise and just-learned— the problem with teachers, Lance thinks, is that they’ve known this stuff for years and years, and have forgotten how they struggled and learned it in the first place— are, if slightly more snappy, understandable. 

But like Pidge, Keith has trouble with history. And surprisingly, Lance can help with that. “You just have to pretend like it’s a really boring story,” he explains. “Not just a bunch of facts. Trust me, I can’t remember facts.” 

“So I pretend  _ this  _ guy,” Lance jabs a pen at a skinny guy with a wig and a mustache, “is old-time Coran, Pidge’s wacky neighbor, and I pretend  _ that  _ guy,” Lance jabs a pen at a guy who’s just, frankly, ugly, no matter what time period, “is Mr. Iverson.” 

Keith laughs. “I can see the resemblance.” 

“I know, right?” Lance says fondly. “He hated me— he loved you, though.” 

“And that’s where you’re completely wrong,” Keith says. “Iverson hated my guts. You think he liked having some halfer in his class getting higher grades than his star students? Nah. He tried to dock me for some really stupid stuff.” 

“Oh.” And here, Lance is dumbfounded. He used to hate Keith, too, or at least really dislike him, but he never gave much thought to the fact Keith was half-Chinese. Keith was just Keith, dark eyes and stupid hair. “Well, Iverson’s a goon who’s never gonna score.” 

_ And neither am I _ , he thinks, self-deprecating. 

Lance feels it before he really knows it— this stream of fear that zips through his veins like lightning, a warning that he, unfortunately, ignores. 

“Thanks,” Keith says, and touches his hand to Lance’s shoulder. “Even if that was  _ crude _ , man.” 

And it’s that simple touch that makes Lance realize he’s fallen. They are alone in Keith’s room, and Lance’s pulse is going off at fifty miles an hour, his shoulder burning like a wildfire where Keith had tapped it. He’s in eighth grade all over again, mind alien and skin too tight for his body, except this time, he’s in real trouble. 

It’s not Rolo, some asshole he doesn’t even know. It’s Keith Kogane. 

Lance forgets one thing, though. When Lance had saw Keith with split knuckles and blood running to the pavement, Keith had asked Lance what he’d call him: an orphan, a bastard, a mongrel, or a fag. The first three terms have proven to be true, though they’re not sick or slurred, the way the insults suggested them to be. 

The fourth term has never come up. Not ever. 

\---

Pidge’s sophomore year, Matt starts college, and the house is silent once again. Not as empty of a silence as it’d been beforehand— Pidge feels somewhat safer, knowing that Matt is at a respectable institution and not God knows where on the other side of the ocean. 

Before Matt had left, though, he’d said, “Pidge, be good to Mom, okay?” 

It had felt like there was a deeper meaning to those words said than Matt had originally intended for there to be, so Pidge, being Pidge, had thought about it. And at fifteen, she realizes that although she loves both her parents the same, her actions have always clearly favored her father over her mother. 

And to be fair, her father’s role was always so much nicer. Her father was there to encourage, sometimes spoil her, while her mother nagged and cared for Pidge’s well-being. But in the dead of the night, reflecting on the implications behind Matt’s words, a mixture of regret and guilt set in. 

It’s hard, because she and her mother don’t exactly get along fantastically. But Pidge, awkwardly, starts saying  _ good afternoon  _ when she gets back to the house, tries to give actual replies when her mom asks her how school went instead of her usual,  _ fine _ . Tries to talk, in general. 

“Hey, Mom?” Pidge asks, one night. 

“Yes, Pidge?” 

“Do you ever get the feeling—” Pidge swallows, mouth dry. She doesn’t want to say it, but she  _ needs  _ to, and her mom is the only one that could possibly understand. “That Dad isn’t dead.” 

At this point, the actual probabilities of Samuel Holt’s survival are low. But Pidge always clings to that gut instinct that tells her that he’s out there somewhere. 

“Yes,” her mom finally says, eyes glassy, and that’s that. 

And she thinks her mother notices, because in turn, her mother starts trusting her a little more, treating Pidge like an actual adult. That might be a decision that Pidge causes her mom to regret very quickly, because once Pidge knows about a problem, she does everything in her power to solve it. 

\---

It’s something her mom says about Matt, college, and money.

“I’ll get a part-time job,” Pidge immediately volunteers. 

Her mom chokes. “What are you talking about?” she snaps, eyes flashing. “Why on earth would you need to do that? We’re making ends meet just fine.” 

“I’m not stupid, I know what loans and debt are,” Pidge retorts. “Besides, Lance has a part-time job, now, too. He helps out at his dad’s warehouse. Please, Mom, I can help.” 

“You’re a fifteen-year-old girl, you shouldn’t be involving yourself in things like this,” her mom says. And the thing is, her mom doesn’t know to specify,  _ you should be enjoying yourself and focusing on your studies _ , so all Pidge hears is  _ you’re too young  _ and that always-present  _ you’re a girl  _ and gets mad. She storms off; dinner that night is extremely awkward. 

Somehow, Pidge ends up talking to Coran about it. Coran’s mannerisms have lessened in oddity after awhile of living here, and though Pidge would never admit it, she’s grown quite fond of him. 

“I can help out  _ just fine _ ,” she fumes to Coran, crossing her arms. 

Coran puts his finger on his chin in an exaggerated thinking pose. “Well, it’s not me that you heard it from,” he says, “but I’ve got a contact at a plaza around when your high school’s located. She’s looking for a shopgirl to help her out, and you’re a little young, but you might do.” 

“Really?” Pidge asks, excited. “Can you ask?” 

“I’ll put in a good word,” he says. “But again, you didn’t hear about this from here. Wouldn’t want the wrath of your mother directed at me. She can be quite terrifying.” 

Coran keeps his promise, and that’s how Pidge ends up in the back room at Altean Clothing, wondering what exactly she’s gotten herself into. Altean Clothing is high end. Shiny, like Garrison. None of this stuff would fit her— she’s started menstruating, which she hates, but her body is still like a boy’s. 

“Are you Katherine Holt?” a woman’s voice asks. 

Pidge’s mouth goes dry. The woman is tall and imposing, her hair so blonde it’s almost white, with a gorgeous natural tan and bright blue eyes. Pidge is stubborn, but she is by no means stupid. “Yes,” she says. No way will she push her nickname agenda at this lady. 

“I’m Allura,” the woman says, smiling. “Coran’s told me about you before, actually. Said you were very smart, learned very fast. And I trust Coran’s judgment—” well, at least one of them did, then “— so this will be brief.” 

“You’ll work Monday to Friday for three hours after school; pay is two dollars and thirty cents an hour. Your responsibilities will include, but are not limited to: taking inventory of clothing, restocking and make sure the shelves are in order, and assisting customers.” 

Pidge calculates, deciding it’s good money. Is it this easy? “Understood.” 

“The only thing is, I need your guardian’s permission,” Allura says, and Pidge internally winces. There it is. She’d got this far on her own means, but now she supposes she’ll have to tell her mother. “Both of you will sign this contract—” and here, she produces a contract from seemingly nowhere “— and as soon as you do that, you can start.” 

Not surprisingly, her mother loses it. 

“You did this without my knowing?  _ Katherine Holt _ —” 

“I just want to help,” Pidge says stubbornly. “I know the numbers, this’ll add up over the year.” 

“Three hours a day after school, though? Katie,” her mother sighs. “I’ve been through this before. I  _ know  _ Garrison works you hard. Sometimes you don’t go to bed until late, studying. I won’t let you sacrifice yourself by spending so much of your time on this.” 

Pidge crosses her arms. “Matt’s got a job. Lance’s got a job,” she argues. “And I’m  _ smart _ , Mom. I’ll be just fine.” 

“I  _ know _ you’re smart, you just have a tendency to overwork yourself,” her mom retorts, not without some truth. “I can’t have you keeling over on my watch. Who told you this job, anyway? One of your teachers? I want to have a  _ talk _ —” 

“Two dollars and thirty cents an hour. If at any time you decide that my work isn’t worth it, and by that I mean ‘I keel over,’ like you say, then I’ll quit.” Pidge eyes her mom with her fiercest stare, trying to channel Keith’s cold gaze. “Everyone else is working. Why shouldn’t I?” 

Her mom stares. Then, “It was Coran, wasn’t it?” she fumes. 

To this day, Pidge has no idea how she figures that out, and she swears to Coran she never mentioned his name. But it doesn’t matter, because on Tuesday, she goes to Altean Clothing with the form signed and trades it for a stiff uniform, a white blouse and black skirt. 

She gets two hours’ worth of explanation on how everything is organized and priced, and she has no issue with that. 

When she really,  _ really  _ realizes what she’s in for, though, and by that she means she steps out of the back room, she starts to panic. She knows nothing about clothes; she’s had three friends her whole life; and the position she had taken was that of a  _ shopgirl _ . 

She freezes up speaking to some customers and snaps at others. Her mother’s imaginary voice chides her—  _ told you so _ — but Pidge hates being proven wrong. She will stick this out, the same way she sticks the Garrison out. 

Immediately after she gets off of the Subway, she barges into Lance’s house. “Lance,” she says. She despises asking for favors, but Lance isn’t the worst person to owe. “You know how I’m working at Altean Clothing now? Can you please teach me how you, you know, talk to people?” 

“What do you mean, how I talk to people?” Lance asks, smoothing back his hair. He seems to be enjoying Pidge’s request way too much. “It just comes naturally.” 

Pidge glares. “ _ Not  _ the time for this. I need help.” 

Lance grins. “Well, you came to the master.” Pidge valiantly fights the urge to roll her eyes. To Lance’s credit, though, he doesn’t joke around too much after that. He lets her explain what she needs and then immediately starts to help. 

“First off, you need to look like you’ve got confidence. Make eye contact.” 

“Second, you have to smile. Customer service.” Pidge tries to do so, and Lance grimaces. “You look like you want to kill someone. Try again.” Pidge tries to make it look a little more natural, and Lance sighs. “I guess that works.”

“Not all of us can be you,” she grits out, cheeks hurting. 

“Watch the temper,” Lance warns, and Pidge guiltily remembers tutoring sessions where she had not, in fact, watched her temper. “Customers are going to be awful, but you gotta always sound friendly.” 

“It’s just, they don’t have any  _ common sense _ ,” Pidge complains. “This one lady got really mad at me for not having shoes in her size, even though I  _ obviously  _ am not in charge of shipment and I know zero about shoes.” 

“Yeah, but you just have to go with it,” Lance says easily, and Pidge wonders where Lance learned this stuff. The warehouse, probably. “Always say stuff like  _ how can I help you _ ? and compliment them. A lot. Even if they don’t look good. Compliments will get you far.” 

It’s good Lance clarified on that last one, because the people who come into the store are rich enough that they can pay to try and improve their looks, but sometimes, it’s to no avail. 

“Alright. Eye contact, smile, compliments,” Pidge says, committing this to memory. 

In the safety of Lance’s house, it doesn’t seem so hard, but she wonders if she’ll remember that in Altean Clothing.  _ No _ , she thinks. She can do this; she’s been in harder situations before. 

“Hey, it could be worse,” Lance says. “Could you imagine  _ Keith  _ trying to do all that?” 

Pidge can’t help it; she laughs at the mental image. Keith is probably even worse with people than she is. “That’s so mean,” she chides, probably sounding a lot like her mother, and winces. “Whatever. It’s just nice you two aren’t trying to kill each other anymore.” 

She expects a retort like,  _ what are you talking about, I still want him dead _ , but Lance just hugs his knees to his chest. The smile has disappeared from his eyes. “I mean, I guess.” 

Pidge raises an eyebrow. “You and Keith…” she says slowly. 

“What about us?” 

Lance’s voice is sharp. Pidge swallows. “Nothing.” 

But Lance must think she knows, even though she really doesn’t, only has an inkling. 

“Listen, you can’t tell him,” Lance says frantically. “You can’t tell  _ anyone _ .” 

“What?” 

“I…” Lance looks down, fiddles with his thumbs. Pidge has only seen him so agitated twice in her life— one, when he was coming out to her, and two, when he was studying for the Garrison test. There’s no test coming up right now. “You know.” 

“You like him?” Pidge asks, astounded. 

“Don’t say it out loud!” 

For anything else, Pidge would be pleased to know she’d arrived at the correct conclusion, but there’s obvious concerns with the current scenario. What happens now? Keith and Lance have only recently went from enemies to sort-of friends; this new layer complicates everything. 

“I won’t tell. But that explains some stuff,” Pidge says, and Lance hides his face in his hands. Suddenly, something occurs to her. “Does  _ Keith  _ know?” 

“Of course not! He’s still sitting with us, isn’t he? He knows  _ nothing _ , and it has to stay that way.” 

Lance sounds desperate, and Pidge, unfortunately, completely understands. She doesn’t know what Keith’s stance is on this— she would like to think he wouldn’t be disgusted, but she isn’t sure, since the subject is so taboo. The two of them would be good together, she thinks sadly. There must be some other universe where it works out. 

All she can do in this universe, though, is say, inadequately, “I’m sorry.” 

“Yeah. I’m sorry too.” Lance looks up, attempts a smile, although his expression stays more terrified than anything. “It’s fine, though. You’re going to be awesome at your job, and I’m going to deal with… well… this. It’ll be fine.” 

_ It’ll be fine _ . Pidge certainly hopes so. It’s only November of tenth grade, and she doesn’t know if it’ll be fine, but she knows it’s going to be quite a year. “Thanks for the help,” she says, because what else she can say? 

Lance doesn’t gloat at her thank-you, eyes faraway. “No problem.” 

\---

Algebra 2 is a piece of cake compared to Lance’s new revelation. 

Once he notices he’s attracted to Keith, everything about Keith becomes attractive. _ Everything _ . 

To be honest, Lance wonders how he missed this before. One of the most infuriating things about the John Lennon mullet has always been how well Keith pulls it off. And it’s not just the hair. It’s his eyes and voice and smile and laugh, and Lance feels sick and dirty for noticing any of it. 

When he’s around Keith, his pulse explodes and he feels like he might throw up. 

But at the same time, he’s starved for Keith’s company, intoxicated when Keith’s eyes are on him. The unwanted feelings swirl inside him, threaten to erupt. Lance flirts with more girls and calls Keith more names. He constantly reminds himself he got into Garrison; he can’t let something like this ruin it. 

Damn if Keith doesn’t make it hard for him, though. 

“Why are all my friends engineering  _ geeks _ ?” Lance asks, because it’s the only thing he can come up with that doesn’t make him sound love-struck and starry-eyed. 

In front of him is a motorcycle. Apparently, Shiro had found it in broken condition and polished it up until it was good as new, and given it to Keith. 

“I didn’t even help fix it that much,” Keith retorts, but Lance doesn’t even hear him, too busy despairing over the fact that Keith now has a motorcycle, and will now probably look ten times more attractive than he already is. “We’re just going to paint it.”

Bright crimson. The paint taunts him.  _ I know what you are _ . “Red?” Lance says, voice cracking.  _ Get it together _ . “Of course you go for the most obnoxious color possible.” 

“Hey, you wanna help or not?” Keith says, and yes, Lance does, although he isn’t sure if he’ll survive this. “Sides. Obnoxious is right up your alley.” 

The two of them focus on painting, not talking all that much. Lance traces the bright red, like blood, along the silver and black. Keith will look like a real troublemaker on it, and maybe that’s the point. Keith has a penchant for the daring and flashy, and unfortunately, it looks real good on him. 

They finish the first coat that day, and Lance presumes Keith does the rest of it himself. 

\---

When the topic of the motorcycle comes up at at lunch, Hunk and Pidge look impressed. “Are you going to ride it to school?” Hunk asks. “That’s definitely cooler than walking.” 

“It’ll definitely fit your image,” Pidge adds thoughtfully. Keith tilts his head like a confused puppy.  _ What image _ ? “Don’t play dumb. I don’t even talk to my classmates, and I know girls think you’re all mysterious and manly and exotic.” 

“I  _ didn’t  _ know that, actually,” Keith retorts, a light blush creeping up his face. Figures. Keith is oblivious— he hasn’t noticed that sometimes Lance acts  _ really  _ weird around him. “What’s the big deal, anyway? I just like speed and the color red.” 

Pidge rolls her eyes. “Of course you do.” 

“Don’t knock anyone over when you’re going two thousand miles per hour,” Lance says, just to say something, because he’s been silent for far too long for it to be normal. 

Pidge is right, though. Girls  _ do  _ like Keith. Lance flirts and is never taken seriously, with his lanky body and lopsided smile and mischievous eyes. There’s something too boyish about him. 

Keith, on the other hand— over the summer, his skin has turned gold and his eyes flash like black ice, and Lance might’ve fallen first, but he’s certainly not the last. For some reason, girls like how Keith seems so rough around the edges. Lance would like to say he doesn’t understand it, but he does. 

Keith is uncomfortable with the attention, though, once it’s pointed out to him. “I just want to be seen as normal,” he says quietly. 

But that’s impossible with the image he’s so unknowingly constructed. 

And Lance hates himself for the fact he can’t see Keith as normal, either. Normal, normal, normal, he repeats to himself. But there is nothing normal about this whole situation.  _ I’m going to hell _ , he thinks, and that dread that had so occupied his mind in eighth grade returns with a vengeance, a demon with black claws around his heart. 

He can’t hold out for much longer. 

Keith finishes the motorcycle and Lance is done in. The motorcycle doesn’t generate too much attention— other guys at the school have motorcycles, after all— but it helps push Lance to lose it. 

He’s over at Keith’s; it’s six o’clock and they’ve finished their homework when Keith asks, eyes gleaming, “Want a ride?” 

And Lance is so stupid. He says yes. He blames it on the math homework this time— it’s fried his brain. He follows Keith out into the chilly March air and shivers, half to do with the cold, half for completely unrelated reasons. 

The pavement is damp from last night’s rain. And Lance really,  _ really  _ hadn’t anticipated the logistics of this. A motorcycle is built for one person; there is only one seat. 

“Here, have a helmet,” Keith says. “Shiro will have my head if I give you a concussion.” 

“That’s really reassuring,” Lance says, because it’s all he can muster up. “How many passerby have you killed up till now?” 

“Zero, actually.” Lance’s fingers are numb as he straps the helmet under his head. “Alright, get on.” 

“What do I hold onto?” Lance asks, although he thinks he already knows the answer. 

“Unfortunately, me.” 

Objectively, the ride is  _ awesome _ . 

When Keith revs up, Lance wants to bottle up the sensation and relive it whenever he’s down. The whir of the engine, the wind whistling through his hair and making his eyes water. Lance’s ears and legs are cold, but everything else warm where he’s holding onto Keith, bodies lined up against each other. Lance yells and Keith laughs, the sound torn away by the wind. 

But Lance decides, at maybe the two minute mark, that all of this needs to stop, immediately. He’s too addicted. There will be consequences. Lance won’t be able to pretend for much longer. 

“So? How was that?” Keith says, when they’re back at his house. “Pretty cool?” 

Lance stares down at the ground, the sky dusk blue above his head. “I guess. I think I lost my sense of hearing, though.” 

To be honest, he lost a lot of things that ride. 

\---

Stupid actions follow stupid decisions, and after that, Lance resolves to avoid Keith whenever he can. 

To be fair, it’s finals season, so maybe Lance’s off-ness makes a little sense. He spends his lunches in the library, studying miserably on a grumbling stomach. He stops going over to Keith’s house, wrestling with formulas on his own. He stops poking Keith in math class, fixing his eyes on his worksheet. 

Who is he kidding. Finals season or not, his avoidance is plainly obvious. 

He thinks Keith might be hurt, he isn’t sure. Hunk and Pidge have noticed— “Dude, you alright?” Hunk asks. “What’s up?” Pidge fires— but Keith doesn’t ever say anything. His blank expression doesn’t give anything away either, so even when Lance accidentally looks at him before quickly looking away, Lance can’t tell anything. 

He thinks, maybe he’s getting away with it. Maybe they are better off like this. 

He thinks that until Keith snags him by the strap of his bag while Lance and Pidge are heading to the station after school, demanding, “Can we talk?” 

“Uh, kinda need to get home,” Lance says. Pidge continues walking without him, clearly not willing to help him out. And that’s fair. His excuse was a flimsy, incompetent one, and Lance knows Pidge hates both flimsiness and incompetence. 

“Yeah, you can spare a minute. It’s never stopped you from coming over before,” Keith says, glaring. 

Lance doesn’t know what to do. He follows. There’s an iron vice around his chest, and he prays he won’t shake, that his jaw won’t lock up. He’s so nervous he doesn’t know what to do. Keith is definitely going to call him out for his behavior, but maybe Keith has figured the  _ other  _ thing out. Maybe Keith is going to punch the living daylights out of him. 

When they’re somewhat alone, Lance rooted to the pavement like the concrete is melted, Keith says, “You’re ignoring me.” 

It’s not a question. But Lance says, “No.”

“Bogus.” Keith says. “You won’t look me in the eye. What did I do wrong?” 

“Nothing,” Lance says. “Listen, it’s final season, I really need to get home.” He turns and walks the other direction, but then he feels a hand snag around his wrist, stopping him in his tracks. 

When he looks at Keith, it makes his heart twist. Keith’s face, usually so impassive, is a spectrum of emotion, like an open book. There’s anger and hurt and, surprisingly, enough fear to match Lance’s own. 

“Did Hunk tell you?” Keith asks. “Is  _ that  _ what this is about?” 

Through Lance’s own fear cuts a sliver of confusion. “Hunk?” Lance sputters. 

“He did tell you, didn’t he?” Keith says, and okay, now Lance is  _ really  _ confused. “S that it? So I guess you’re all disgusted now. You think I’m wacked.” 

No, Hunk didn’t tell him  _ anything _ , but boy, is Lance curious now. “Keith—” 

“Save it.” Keith lets go of his wrist, like he’s been burned. “Sorry for  _ touching  _ you, then.”

Keith turns away and stalks off, but his head is low and his shoulders sag. Lance stands on the sidewalk, confused out of his mind and feeling like the world’s worst person. 

Lance has to find this out. He takes a different route then usual and gets off at the station that’s closest to Hunk’s home, before hesitantly knocking on the door. He’s only done this once or twice; Hunk is someone Lance talks to more at school. 

Fortunately, it’s Hunk that opens the door, not his mom or sister. Lance doesn’t really feel like facing them right now. “What’s up, man?” Hunk asks. Then, seeing the twisted expression on Lance’s face, he tacks on, “Are you alright?”

“What’d Keith tell you?” Lance blurts out. 

“Huh? Keith didn’t tell me anything.” It’s the truth for only a moment, but then a lightbulb goes off behind Hunk’s eyes and his expression promptly switches to one horror. Lance seizes it. Hunk can’t hide anything to save his life. 

“What’s his secret?” Lance demands. “Why would he think that I think he’s wacked?” 

“Nothing,” Hunk says quickly. “Dude, why are you asking, anyway? I thought you and Keith are done for.” 

Lance’s face burns with shame. This really could not have ended well, and he curses himself out for being unable to pretend everything was normal, because even Hunk, who never gets angry, is looking somewhat annoyed. Everything is messed up. “Listen, I  _ know  _ I’ve been acting weird. And I can’t explain. But I need to know what’s the deal with Keith.” 

“Honestly, I thought you knew already,” Hunk says quietly. “And no, I can’t tell you. Keith told me to keep it a secret.” 

Lance bites his mouth. “Please, I need to  _ know _ —” 

“I’m sorry,” Hunk says, voice sad. And then he closes the door. 

\---

For Pidge, the tail end of sophomore year objectively stinks. It isn’t that anything particularly earth-shattering occurs, but every day is just hard to get through. Finals season is awful in general, and the extenuating circumstances make it even worse. 

The worst part is that she can’t show any sign of struggle. At Garrison, she keeps her face impassive, refusing to be the subject of any pity; it’s a matter of pride. At home, she makes sure her expression stays neutral under the hawk-eyed gaze of her mom, because if she looks too tired, her mom will make her quit the job. 

The only time of the day when she can let down her guard is lunch, and thanks to whatever happened between Lance and Keith, lunch is now officially the most awkward, depressing affair ever. She’s talked to Hunk about it once, and even Hunk, ever the mediator, can’t do anything. 

Pidge asks Lance, near the end of the year, “Can’t you fix things between you and Keith?” 

It’s unfair of her to say, and she knows it, but she’s exhausted and finals are in a week. 

Lance shakes his head. “I… don’t know.” 

“What even happened between the two of you, anyway?” she asks, although she’s pretty sure she knows the basics already. 

“Long story short, the feelings got too much, and so I tried to avoid him so we wouldn’t… stop being friends…” he stops, realizing the paradox of his statement. 

“Yeah, and look how well  _ that  _ worked out,” Pidge says, and she can’t help the note of bitterness that seeps into her voice. 

“Pidge, you don’t  _ get  _ it,” Lance snaps, frustrated. “You might be okay with me being—” he pauses, unable to say it “— but  _ I’m  _ not, alright? And Keith won’t be okay with it either. You have— you have no idea how scary it is. You think I  _ wanted  _ this— whatever?” 

Pidge wonders how loving someone could hurt so much. She wonders how a love so right could be so wrong. 

Chastised, she doesn’t say anything to Lance after that, and just wishes that things would go back to the way before, even though that might be impossible. Lunch becomes a Lance-less, silent affair, she, Hunk, and Keith studying and trying to ignore all the elephants in the room. Hunk seems to know something about all this, too, but Pidge has no idea what, or how much. 

Being bound to secrecy is so  _ frustrating _ , she thinks. She can’t even compare notes with one of her best friends. 

Pidge is relieved when school ends and she can breathe blue-skied, Garrison-free air. Summer doesn’t fix everything, but it has its upsides. Maybe after summer, things could be fixed. But right now, she will take not having to wake up at five o’clock, not having to try and rewire time to have more than twenty-four hours per day so she can study and work at the same time. 

And Matt comes home, which is, of course, a plus. “Pidge!” he says, grinning. “We made it!” 

Matt looks good, like the mental wounds from Vietnam have maybe started to heal over. Pidge is happy for him. With Matt, she finishes up the radio, which Pidge has transferred from Keith’s home to theirs, and it’s like magic when it crackles to life and starts playing a commercial for laundry detergent. 

_ I wish you could see this, Dad _ . 

\---

In June, when she and Matt dance to summer hits and invite Lance over, it almost feels like before. They deem a fire hydrant the moon and sprint, Pidge still as wily and nimble as ever. But it’s a little different in how Lance seems unwilling to tackle either of them to the ground, or how Matt will wince whenever there’s an overly loud noise from the sidewalk. The moon is no longer an impossibility, but being a kid is. 

At Altean Clothing, Allura says, “Coran really wasn’t kidding about you,” and Pidge tries not to feel too flattered by the praise. “If you want to up your hours in the summer, just tell me.” 

So she does, and inevitably, Matt comes with a few times. He’s starstruck when he sees Allura, whispering to Pidge, “She looks like a princess.” 

Pidge scoffs. “Wipe that lovestruck expression off your face, idiot.” 

But Pidge grudgingly admits that he’s correct. Allura is the kind of imposing that is impossible not to take seriously, and Pidge kind of envies it. There’s something so polished about her; Allura walks easily in heels and her eyes are blue steel. She has a very specific air, an air that Pidge knows she will never herself acquire. 

That air is also what makes it so unnerving when Allura tries to befriend her. At least, that’s what Pidge  _ thinks  _ is happening— she can’t really tell. After Allura first calls Pidge over to the back room after work, sometime during finals season, Pidge’s hands go clammy, and she wonders if she’s about to be fired. 

“Yes?” Pidge asks, trying not to squeak. 

“I heard your friend the other day when he came in with you.” Pidge rifles through her memory, and recalls Lance coming in with her. Did Lance do something stupid, something to warrant Pidge losing her job? She is going to kill him. “He called you Pidge. Is that a nickname of yours?” 

Pidge doesn’t know whether to say yes or no. Will being Pidge get her fired? 

Allura seems to sense her distress. “I just wanted to know so you could tell me if you would prefer to be called that,” she clarifies, and Pidge untenses in cautious relief. “That’s all.” 

Pidge shakes her head. “Uh, no. Katherine or Katie works fine. Thank you.” 

Allura seems almost disappointed. “Oh. Alright, then. Have a safe trip home, Katherine.” 

Pidge doesn’t regret her answer— she would find it strange for Allura to suddenly start calling her by her nickname— but she does manage to feel more comfortable around Allura after some time, mainly because she gets the sense that Allura, bizarrely, seems to find her an equal. 

Pidge’s duties at the store expand in the summer, and it’s in a direction she likes— Allura starts having her look over the money side of things, and if there’s anything Pidge is good at, it’s crunching numbers. 

“You’re very good at this,” Allura murmurs delightedly, looking over her work. “I would love to have you here full-time.” 

Pidge can’t tell if she’s kidding or not, and blinks owlishly.

“Of course, I don’t  _ mean  _ to ask you to work here full time, I’m well aware you have school,” Allura adds hastily. Allura is good at assisting customers and managing business, but she falters a little when it comes to trying to make casual conversation with Pidge. “It’s just— are you considering going into finance later?” 

“No.” In perfect honesty, Pidge hates money. She considers it a necessary evil; their family has been shackled to a shortage of it all their life. “I want to be an engineer.” 

The words taste so heavy, telling Allura. With Lance and Matt, it’d always just been a given about her, but telling someone like Allura makes it so much more  _ real _ . 

“Oh!” Allura seems shocked for a moment, then recovers from it. “I’m sorry, I don’t know why I was so surprised. It’s a very good fit for you.” 

“Thank you,” Pidge says. It comes out awkwardly, but she means it. Allura’s words feel like getting a warm hug. 

“Really,” Allura says, and here, her face goes serious. “Never let anyone tell you you can’t do that, because from what I’ve seen, you’ll be able to achieve anything you want if you put your mind to it.” 

Pidge supposes Allura is speaking from experience when she says that, since Allura’s very presence seems to force every around her into respecting her. It definitely makes Pidge wonder how Allura managed to obtain this kind of position, this kind of image, but eventually, Pidge decides that even if she’ll never be able to get to that level, it’s fine. She’s got her own things going for her. 

\---

At the start of junior year, Matt goes to back to college, Pidge cuts her time at Altean Clothing back to her original three hours, and she gets a seat in Astronomy.

She loves her classes for junior year. 

It isn’t just astronomy. Of course, it’s nice to finally be learning the material Matt told her about all those years ago, but Pidge also finds herself liking physics, which most of her classmates rip their hair out trying to understand but Pidge has a natural grasp of, and pre-calc trig, where Pidge plugs numbers into formulas and gets the speed of a train, the current of a river, the angle of a dart. 

She would actually consider Astronomy to be her third favorite. Lance definitely likes it more than her, but he absolutely  _ hates  _ physics. 

To Pidge’s delight, Lance and Keith, at some point, patch things up. The lunch table is back to its original four members. Even though the air between Lance and Keith is by no means natural, Lance sits there for the whole period now, and Hunk seems relieved. Lunch becomes a cross between a study session and a complaint vent, and generally, it’s much better than last year. Pidge crosses her fingers for it to stay that way. 

“I don’t  _ get _ it,” Lance groans, dropping his head on the table with an audible  _ thunk _ . “I got that the train is traveling at two thousand miles per hour on the test, and I’m pretty sure that isn’t right.” 

“I got two thousand miles miles per hour too,” Keith says. 

Lance lights up, before he schools his face into a forcedly casual expression. “Really? So I was right?” 

“No, you were both just wrong,” Hunk says absentmindedly, and the words, unsugarcoated in a very un-Hunk-like manner, causes Pidge to burst out laughing, while Keith and Lance stare at him in surprise. Hunk suddenly realizes what he said, and backtracks. “No! I just meant— I think you guys both forgot to change the units…” 

“Oh, darn, you’re  _ right _ ,” Lance says, putting two fingers against his forehead. “But seriously, buddy, couldn’t you have said it nicer?” 

Hunk blushes. “I was distracted!” 

“By what?” Pidge says, curiosity piqued. Hunk’s gaze shifts over, betraying him, and Pidge seizes on it, following his line of sight over to a pretty girl with short brown hair and tan skin. “Oh, I  _ see _ .” 

“Is that Shay?” Lance howls, delighted, and Pidge shoves a hand over his mouth so that the whole cafeteria doesn’t hear. Lance fights Pidge’s hand off, continues, “She’s really nice, you picked good, my man!” 

“Good luck,” Keith says, soft. 

To no one’s surprise, Hunk’s face is the shade of an overripe tomato. 

Objectively, the development of Hunk’s love life is a relief. Pidge loves the simplicity of the will-they won’t-they, teases him when he stutters that he’s just helping her with math, that’s all, it’s nothing, pats him on the back when he thinks Shay doesn’t return his feelings. 

It’s a breath of fresh air after the whole Lance and Keith situation, and Lance hops aboard the train, too. 

Hunk crosses his arms. “What about  _ you _ , Lance?” he fires back one day, when he’s been backed into a corner by Lance’s teasing. “You got a girl on your mind?” 

“Uh…” Lance flounders. Pidge tenses up, aware of the potential repercussions of Lance’s answer. The air between him and Keith crackles with electricity. “No. It’d be too unfair just to give my heart to one girl, you know? Everybody wants a piece of this.” 

“Don’t be gross, Lance,” Pidge says, although secretly, she’s delighted with the deftness of his answer. 

“Yeah, you’re a real ladies’ man,” Keith says dryly, but something about his voice is off. 

Hunk turns to Pidge. “What about you?” he asks, surprising everybody. “Anyone you’re thinking of?” 

Lance snorts. “Yeah, right. Pidge is gonna marry her math textbook when she’s older. Her boy problems begin and end with missing her brother when he’s at college.” 

“Never refer to Matt as my boy problems ever again,” Pidge retorts, “or else I’ll put my fist through your face.” 

“I’ll help,” Keith volunteers. 

Lance shudders. “Scary.” 

It’s a little unnerving, though. Pidge wonders if she might not be capable of romantic love. She’s afraid to bring it up with her mother, who, despite her qualms with Pidge’s personality, seems certain that some boy will be charmed enough to marry her someday. But Pidge can’t imagine ever loving someone the way she loves the stars. 

And she’s fine with that, except it’s a little lonely, watching everyone else fall in love, with a gut feeling she will never experience that kind of thing herself. 

She thinks that sometime while demanding everybody call her Pidge, she gave up Katie, whoever she was. To rise to the top in mathematics and science, she pushed aside the fact she was a girl, because in this world, the fact she was a girl hampered her. She refuses to regret her decision, but sometimes, she wonders. 

Sometimes, she misses the feeling of skirts, of being able to put her hair in a braid. Sometimes, she wishes she could get along with all the other girls in her school, instead of just being seen as that oddball who studied too much and got high grades. Sometimes, at Altean Clothing, she touches the fabric of different dresses and wonders if there was some version of her that could wear them and not feel utterly ridiculous. 

But she wouldn’t give up this road she’s walked for anything. 

“What do I need to do to become an engineer?” she asks her physics teacher, after class. Her physics teacher, an old man is his seventies, adores her, and his eyes gleam. 

“Well,” he says, “how much do you know about college?” 

\---

It had been at the end of August when Lance apologized. 

It takes the whole summer before junior year, but eventually, Lance gets brave enough to say sorry. He takes the underground over to Keith’s house, not even completely sure of what he’s going to say, and hangs at the door for a good five minutes trying to muster up the courage to knock. 

He doesn’t even end up needing to knock, anyway, because the door flies open of its own accord, and Lance startles and stumbles back. Keith stands at the threshold, eyes widening for a single moment in shock— and maybe hope— before his expression seals off into a blank mask. “Hey,” he says, voice even. 

“Hi,” Lance croaks. He wishes he’d thought this out better. “What are you doing here?” 

“This is where I live,” Keith deadpans. “I was going for a run. What do you want?” 

And Keith’s face might be impassive, but the fact he’s even allowing Lance a chance to explain gives almost everything away. For anyone else, Keith would’ve shot a few choice words before slamming the door in their face, but with Lance, Keith has already forgiven him. 

Lance takes a deep breath. “I’ve really been a moron,” he blurts out. 

There might be a ghost of a smile at that. “Yeah, you have.” 

“And Hunk didn’t tell me anything, by the way. I don’t know what secret you have, but whatever it is, it’s fine. I don’t know why you think I’d be disgusted with you.” 

Here, Keith reacts. 

“Well, you were avoiding me like the plague! What else was I supposed to think?” Keith retorts, eyes flashing. “And I know Hunk didn’t tell you anything, because he told me he didn’t after I confronted him, so tell me. Why the hell did you do it?” 

Lance’s mouth goes dry. “It was…” he can’t tell Keith. “I can’t tell you. But it was all my fault, it wasn’t anything you did. I’m really sorry.” 

“That’s a  _ really _ bad explanation,” Keith says. 

Lance’s heart sinks. “I know.”

“Just— if I forgive you, will you promise me not to pull anything like that again?” Keith demands, rubbing his temples, and Lance almost doesn’t register what that means.  _ Again _ . “Or else I’ll kill you next time.” 

Hope shoots through Lance’s chest. “Really?” 

And his tone must say,  _ that easy _ ? because Keith scowls, says, “I haven’t forgiven you yet.” (He has.) “Promise, you jerk.” 

“Of course, fine, I promise,” Lance says, and amazingly, Keith starts talking about how Pidge came over the summer to collect the radio and has finished it over at her house. Lance can’t believe it. He tried to put a bandage over a bullet wound and it  _ worked _ . He tries not to think about what that will mean. 

Keith doesn’t push more for Lance’s reasoning, and Lance doesn’t ask about what Keith told Hunk, even though some part of him is dying to know. 

And Lance might be back at square one, trying to get over Keith and miserably failing, but he has to admit this is easier. 

\---

At least lunch is a much smoother deal. Hunk and Pidge seem equally relieved that they’ve made up, and Lance has them as support systems to complain to when physics gets too hard. He thought his other subjects had been hard, but it’s physics that he can’t wrap his head around to save his life. 

He does, however, manage to secure a seat in astronomy, and he loves it. Astronomy requires a little bit of physics, which is probably his only motivation to learn physics, the subject from hell, as he calls it in his head. 

Astronomy means he finally gets to learn about stars and planets and the huge swath of the universe that remains unexplored. He doesn’t even get distracted like he does with every other class, and therefore, it’s easier. 

And for the first time in his life, a teacher likes him. She puts little smiley face stickers on his homework and writes nice comments at the top of his tests, and she always makes sure to bid him farewell at the end of class. 

“You’re her star student,” Pidge remarks, no malice in it. “Pun intended.” 

Keith likes it equally. He is much better at him with diagrams and sketches, and so he and Lance often work together for homework. Lance is right back to sophomore year, the yearning in his chest so huge he thinks it’ll swallow him whole. He drowns in how Keith smiles. How he says Lance’s  _ name _ . 

Lance wants to run away, but he’s aware of how that worked the last time he tried it, so he sticks it out and tells himself that he’ll hold on. 

“Hey,” Keith says, one day, when Hunk and Pidge are off to work on a project in a shared class at lunch. Keith is sleep-deprived, bags under his eyes, and Lance’s blood sings the way it does whenever Keith’s attention is on him. “Do you want to know what I told Hunk last year?” 

It takes a second for Lance to get what Keith means, and then Lance’s jaw nearly hits the floor. “Uh…” he says faintly. “I mean, if you want to tell me, of course.” 

He tries his best to keep his usual joking tone out of his voice, feeling that even the slightest wrong move might cause Keith to retract his words. Keith’s hands clench into fists atop the table, and he stares at the polished wooden surface, refusing to meet Lance’s eyes. 

“I was just thinking, last night, that you really might be disgusted,” Keith finally says, quiet. “And then I felt guilty.” 

Lance is silent.

Keith’s knee bounces with agitation. “I haven’t been able to tell  _ anybody _ , except Hunk.” 

And suddenly— the way he says it— Lance thinks he might know. It’s improbable and Lance refuses to entertain the thought until Keith actually says it, but Lance gets deja vu to his own sleepless nights, how he hadn’t been able to tell anyone the kind of person he liked until the thought of  _ not  _ telling Pidge tormented him to the point he almost couldn’t eat. “Yeah?” he whispers. 

“I’m gay,” Keith says, voice small. Then, to clarify, “I like guys.” 

And Lance really freezes. He has no idea what to say. His mind is the weirdest blend of storms and fireworks. A whole ten seconds go by and Lance just stares in shock. 

Keith, mistaking Lance’s silence for the feared disgust, immediately scowls. “Whatever. I just thought you’d want to know, in case you wanted to stop hanging out with me.” 

“No, no,” Lance blurts out, finally regaining his power of speech. “Buddy, it’s uh. Cool with me.” 

It is absolutely  _ not  _ fine with Lance, but Keith doesn’t have to know that. His shoulders sag with relief, the tension leaving his body. “Okay,” he says. “So we’re still friends?” 

“Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.” And Lance hastily switches the subject, which Keith allows gratefully. 

Five minutes later, Pidge and Hunk return from the library, bearing a pile of books, and if they notice the weirdness in the air, they don’t mention it. 

It’s awful. Lance has no idea what he’s supposed to do with this information. 

He doesn’t tell Keith that he, too, is gay, because even if he knows that Keith would be okay with that, it would not be okay if Keith learned of the object of Lance’s affections. Lance despises this whole situation, thinks maybe the universe tossed him this curveball just to mess with him. 

It’s so much more painful now that Lance knows that reciprocation is not an impossibility, just something that will never happen. Because Keith might like guys, but no way would he go for  _ Lance _ . Because Keith was  _ Keith  _ and Lance was, well, Lance. 

It doesn’t stop his mind from hopping from place to place. He has daydreams in class where the two of them are holding hands and curses himself out right afterwards, daydreams that occur even in astronomy, Keith’s smile distracting him from the planets. At night, he thinks about the logistics of the two of them in a relationship. They’d get killed. It really is better if Keith doesn’t like him back; it’s easier if they’re friends. 

Just friends, Lance tells himself. Be grateful you’re friends. 

In an attempt to distract himself from distractions, he throws himself into studying, even managing to corral physics to some extent. He and Pidge and Hunk talk about college, which seems to be some strange, nebulous concept far out of reach, but they’re  _ juniors  _ now. 

“I heard people just casually  _ do it  _ with each other like it’s nothing,” Pidge says, eyes round. “I heard they have drugs on campus that make you think you can fly.” 

“Sounds scary,” Hunk comments, looking extremely freaked out. “Let’s  _ not  _ try that.” 

Lance rolls his eyes, says, “You goons are just gonna spend the whole time studying, anyway,” and Pidge aims a book at his head. 

\---

Deep down, Lance knows that the end of high school will mark the diverge for him, Pidge, and Hunk. 

Pidge and Hunk are bound for schools like Harvard and MIT. Lance can’t afford that, for one, and for two, there’s no way he’s cut out for places like those. He might have been able to get into Garrison High, but part of that was sheer luck and the other part was studying so hard his eyes bled onto Coran’s textbooks. 

And Lance is at peace with that. The dream of being an astronaut has carried him this far. Most likely, he’ll end up at the same college Matt’s going to, which is a perfectly respectable institution, and attend it for maybe two to four years before going into the workforce as— he has no idea, but certainly something to do with earth, and not space. 

At night, when he’s asleep, his mother strokes his hair, mutters, “ _ Mijo _ . I’m sorry I couldn’t do better for you.” 

Marco is about to go to high school, and it’s not at Garrison. Lance is the odd one out in their family in terms of that. 

Finally, Lance just tries not to think about the future, that hazy thing that he can’t get a clear picture of no matter how hard he looks, just tries not to be afraid. He doesn’t have the time to be afraid. 

He reminds himself of this as he and Keith stare into the night. 

“We’re so small compared to that,” Keith muses, gesturing out at the expanse of the universe. The two of them are trying to identify constellations, not to much avail. “All of those stars are light years away and thousands of times bigger than us.” 

Lance has stayed over at Keith’s for the night, because their homework requires them to chart some stars and Shiro’s telescopes are even better than the school-issued ones. Keith’s sketching skills aren’t unhelpful, either. What  _ is  _ unhelpful is this. 

The two of them lying on the grass, two silhouettes in the night. 

“I’m too tired to think about the vastness of the universe,” Lance says. “I just wanna sleep.” 

“It doesn’t matter what you do,” Keith says, soft. His voice immediately wakes Lance up, a warning going off inside him that this is dangerous territory. “Your decisions don’t really matter, do they?” 

“What are you talking about?” Lance asks. 

“Like… compared to all that, you’re nothing,” Keith says. “So it doesn’t matter if you decide to sleep right now, or do your homework. It doesn’t matter if you got to college or go off to work after high school. And… it doesn’t matter if you’re gay or straight. The universe doesn’t care.” 

“But it matters to us,” Lance argues, solely to argue. “It matters because we want it to matter.” 

Keith hums. “Huh. Guess you’re right.” 

“Like, I want to go to college later,” Lance says. “I know I won’t be able to follow Pidge and Hunk… they’re geniuses, and I’m just me. But I want to go to the nearby college. Castle University.” 

He’s never talked about this with Keith, actually. This has always been a thing between him, Pidge, and Hunk, who all fought to get into Garrison and who therefore understand each others’ work ethic and constraints and aspirations better than they themselves do. But something about the night loosens his tongue. 

“I want to go there too,” Keith says, surprising Lance. “So I can stay close to Shiro while still learning. I guess we can go together.” 

“What?” Lance demands, rolling over. “Why’d you never tell me?” 

“You never brought it up.” 

Suddenly, the future seems so much less terrifying. A figure clearly emerges through the haze: Keith. Lance doesn’t know why this never occurred to him. He imagines the two of them taking the same classes, eating out at restaurants maybe once a month, befriending various people. 

And now Lance really does feel small, invincible in his minisculinity. It doesn’t matter if his heart rate speeds up to one hundred. It doesn’t matter if his homework drops off to his side, if Keith is looking at him with a question in his eyes. It doesn’t matter if Lance leans forward and presses his mouth to Keith’s. 

It doesn’t matter against the expanse of the universe, but it feels like everything. 

Lance comes to his senses a moment later, lips tingling, eyes widening in regret and shock. “I’m sorry,” he whispers. 

“Why are you sorry?” Keith whispers back, taking Lance’s hand and leaning in again. 

They are just two shadows in the night. Lance can’t see anything, although maybe if he opened his eyes, he’d be able to count Keith’s eyelashes, the little glints of light in his eyes like a miniature galaxy. All he can do is feel the warm slide of Keith’s mouth against his, the way his heart bursts open like a flower. 

He thinks, if kissing this boy is a crime, then Lance would volunteer himself for prison a thousand times over; if loving this boy is a sin, then Lance will gladly go to hell. 

“What are we doing?” Lance has the mind to ask, when he pulls back. 

“I don’t know,” Keith says. “I don’t know.” 

\---

Lance doesn’t tell Pidge. She figures out for herself. 

During lunch, Hunk drops his spoon under her feet, and Pidge ducks under the table to get it. When she does, she sees Lance’s tan fingers intertwined with Keith’s pale ones, and nearly forgets all about the spoon in favor of staring in shock. 

Not that Pidge is one to talk, but isn’t holding hands a sign of courtship? 

She retrieves the spoon and gives it to Hunk. Lance and Keith are arguing about whether their physics teacher’s mustache is really a squirrel in disguise. Their back-and-forth is exactly the same; she can’t tell anything is different. But their hands. She wonders when this happened.

“You seem happier lately,” Pidge ventures, when they’re on the way home from school, snowflakes drifting from the sky. 

She can understand why Lance wouldn’t tell her, but it still stings. “I guess,” Lance says, shrugging. “Guess it’s cause it’s spring, you know?” 

Pidge sets her mouth in a tight line. “Okay.” 

Lance is more perceptive than most people give him credit for; he immediately sees that Pidge is looking for a different answer. “You know,” he says finally, and it’s not a question. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you, Pidge. I really… just don’t want things to get messy. That’s why I hid it.” 

“How long?” 

“I kissed him in November and he didn’t punch me in the face,” Lance says, trying to joke, and Pidge struggles to keep her face impassive. “I don’t know what’s going on, alright? I don’t know if he’s my boyfriend or whatever.” 

“But you’re happy.” And Pidge feels shame burn through her, to have felt so hurt. 

Lance’s mouth curves in a soft smile. “Yeah. I guess I am.” 

\---

March of junior year, Pidge and Hunk take the SAT, and Pidge starts looking into the admission requirements and application processes of the colleges on the list her physics teacher gives her. She studies. A deep sense of loneliness settles in the pit of her stomach. 

Lance hasn’t been over as much lately, and if he’s with Keith, that would make sense. Matt is at college. Hunk is studying, too, on his own. Her mom is off at work. At least the radio plays. It keeps her company while studying, commercials for the latest products and the same forty songs over and over again. 

It becomes so familiar, white noise, that she almost misses it. 

“...  _ The last member of the Kerberos Mission has been found, three years after it occured, _ ” the radio reports. Pidge holds her breath, wondering if she’s imagining all this, holds her breath like if she just doesn’t breathe, time will stop until she’s ready to hear the names. “ _ Samuel Holt, a soldier hailing from from New York City… _ ” 

Pidge stares at the radio like it’s possessed. 

“Mom!” Pidge gasps, when her mother comes back from work. “Mom, they’ve found Dad, he’s coming home—” 

Her mother’s face turns white. “He what? Where did you hear this?” 

“On the radio.” Faintly, Pidge wonders if her mother will pass out— she’s not looking too well. “I’m not kidding, Mom. They said that the last member of the Kerberos Mission has been found, and his name is Samuel Holt.” 

“Oh my goodness,” her mother mumbles in disbelief. “Oh my goodness.” 

A day passes with no news, and Pidge fears she  _ did  _ imagine it, that maybe it was all a dream, but then the telephone rings, bearing the same report. He will be back next week. Pidge almost forgets her studies; for the first time, she doesn’t do her homework. 

Her mother’s face grows ten years younger. 

Pidge tells everyone she can that the news.“I’m so happy for you, child,” Coran says when he hears it, embracing her. With anything else, Pidge would be annoyed at Coran’s choice of name and the hug, but it takes on a different meaning in the context. He’s right; Pidge  _ is  _ a child. She is a child, and she is overjoyed that her dad will finally, finally be coming home. 

The next week, Pidge comes home from Altean Clothing , her father opens the door for her. 

“Pidge,” her father says, and Pidge, for some reason, starts crying.

It’s the first time in years that she’s cried. The last time had been when her father and brother were drafted. She didn’t cry when it was announced that the two of them were missing, or when Matt had come home. But her dad’s appearance causes tears to gush out so quickly that she buries her face in her hands, not even able to look at him. 

“Pidge, it’s okay. I’m here.” 

She feels warm arms wrap around her torso and sobs harder. “I’m not crying,” she mumbles. 

“Of course you’re not,” her father agrees, although every single piece of evidence suggests the contrary. 

Once Pidge has sufficiently calmed down, awkwardly ignoring the dampness on her father’s shirt and her puffy eyes, she takes a step back and looks at him. It’s still obviously her father. His hair is gray now, but there’s still a twinkle in his eye behind his glasses, a kind twist to his mouth. 

He stayed the longest, but Vietnam did not break him. 

She doesn’t even know where to start, and blurts out the most random thing. “I’m learning astronomy now,” she says. “Lance and I are juniors at Garrison and we’re learning astronomy.” 

Her father smiles. “You two always did like space.” 

“Yeah, we did.” She hugs her stomach. She wants to talk about everything, wants to tell her father about Keith and Shiro and Allura, wants to tell him everything she’s learned in school. “I’m going to go to college to become an engineer. My physics teacher is helping me apply.” 

“That’s amazing, Pidge. I’m so proud of you.” 

Those words nearly cause her to start crying again, but Pidge holds her ground this time. When her mom comes home, her mom cries too, and Pidge is silently sorry for the combined flood. Her father has never been good at handling tears, and he doesn’t do tears himself. 

The next day, they invite Lance over, and Lance can’t contain his excitement and yells, “Mr. Holt!” before nearly knocking him over with a hug. 

Pidge’s father grins. “Haven’t changed much, I see?” 

Pidge also writes to Matt that he’s home.  _ They found him while I was off at college? I’m outraged,  _ Matt writes back. Pidge rolls her eyes, scrawls,  _ Hey, you think I didn’t wish you were here too, you dummy? Get yourself back here for the summer.  _

There’s definitely a lot of logistics to be sorted out. The factory that their father used to work for has long since closed down, and he has to search for another job option. Meanwhile, he starts tinkering again, marveling at Pidge’s homemade radio and, embarrassingly enough, the toy car that Hunk, Pidge, and Lance had built in eighth grade, the paint long having peeled off. 

Studying is easier when her father is back, Pidge thinks. She can talk to him about physics, and he elaborates on subjects in a way a textbook can’t. He checks over her applications and makes plans for payment. Their economic situation is better than it’s been for a long time, to be honest, with Pidge and Matt’s combined part-time jobs and her mother’s waitressing. 

April arrives, and for the first time in five years, it really does feel like spring. 

\---

“This is absolutely not a date,” Keith says. 

Lance and Keith are sitting on the curb outside a McDonald’s. Lance holds a burger between his hands, and Keith is dipping his fries in his milkshake, like the complete weirdo he is. And it is not a date. Because the two of them aren’t dating. 

“Right,” Lance agrees. This is just… whatever. 

Both of them are skittish about the word  _ date _ , which is probably what Pidge would call this if she were to call them out on their nonsense, but the simple truth is that Lance and Keith don’t say a lot of things. 

They just hang out. Their banter is interspersed with flirting and Lance calls Keith pet names in Spanish, which is probably not a thing normal friends do, and sometimes, they kiss, which is definitely not a thing normal friends do, but they’re not dating. Because what can Lance do? Barge into his house and announce, “Hey, I have a boyfriend,” and potentially get disowned? 

It’s easier to tell himself they aren’t anything, too. He gets drunk on Keith’s presence; he wakes up the next morning with guilt pounding in his head and regret swirling through his stomach. His empty reassurances to himself are his hangover cure. 

“And we are just… whatever we are,” Keith continues. 

“Right,” Lance agrees, quieter. 

He didn’t want to marry Pidge when he was younger, but damn if he doesn’t want to marry Keith now. Lance is a romantic, loves movies with happy endings and kissing in the rain, but marrying Keith is illegal, and anyway, he’s aware most high school relationships don’t last. 

High school relationships are supposed to be fun and exciting, not make him feel like his whole heart is getting torn apart, but Lance supposes he’s not very good at doing things the right way, anyway. 

“Can I try your gross milkshake-fry thing?” Lance asks, and Keith hands him one obligingly. 

Lance tastes it, and objectively, it’s not bad. The sweetness and saltiness counteract each other. But Lance, just to be difficult, says, “Geez, why can’t you just use ketchup like the rest of everyone else?” 

“Your taste buds are just inferior,” Keith says, rolling his eyes. “And you don’t even  _ like  _ ketchup, Lance, so I guess you’re not like everyone else, either.” 

“Shush.” 

This has to be enough for now. Lance tells him himself he doesn’t want anything more. They can figure out more when they’re in college, anyway. 

\---

May of junior year rolls around all too fast, and Lance buries himself studying in finals. He and Keith don’t study together; Lance doesn’t have a very good concentration in the first place, and Keith distracts him further. Instead, he studies with Pidge, whose focus is laser-sharp. 

Lance finishes up his final paper for astronomy class— he’s usually not confident about his schoolwork, but he really likes it. 

And apparently his astronomy teacher, Mrs. Blue, likes it too, because she says: 

“So I hope you don’t mind, but I sent your paper over to a contact over at MIT.” Lance’s jaw quite nearly drops to the ground. “They were very impressed.” 

“You what? They what?” Lance stammers. 

Faintly, he thinks that his teacher might be amused by his incoherency. “Yes. And they said that they’d offer you a half-off scholarship if you do choose to attend their school,” she says, holding out a packet. “Would you consider going?” 

Lance takes the packet, unable to speak. “I…”

He’s never even considered MIT an option. MIT is for people like Pidge and Hunk, not for him. The idea that a school like that would take an interest in him is, frankly, ludicrous, but here is the proof. And to be honest, he has trouble processing that this is real. Maybe it’s all an elaborate prank. 

“You’ll miss lunch,” Mrs. Blue says gently, and Lance blinks. Right. Lunch. “I’ll see you, Lance. Think about it.” 

Lance nods, stumbles out of the classroom, then tears off toward the cafeteria, breathlessly relaying the news to their table. 

“Far out,” Hunk breathes, probably even more excited than Lance himself is. “You have to go! C’mon, Lance,  _ half-off _ ?” 

Pidge and Lance make eye-contact. She knows him best, knows his family’s economic situation and how hard Lance usually has to study, how easily he gets distracted. She knows that even half-off might not be enough, and she knows that it’s  _ MIT _ . 

And she says, “Hunk’s right. You have to go.” 

Lance coughs. “I… don’t know.” 

The shock of the news has started to wear off, and now Lance is starting to consider the logistics. Even half-off still meant a few thousand dollars of money; the thought of asking his family for such a thing makes Lance cringe. And if somehow, he went, would he survive a place like that? 

He has been so certain of what he’d do— go to the nearby college for four years, then start working— any other option seems impossible. 

Lance glances over at Keith, who’s eyes are boring into him. 

Keith. God, Keith. They’re supposed to go to college together. Keith has been silent for the whole course of the conversation, and Lance can’t tell what he’s thinking. 

He doesn’t dare ask for Keith’s opinion, though, not in the crowded cafeteria, at least. He lets Pidge and Hunk chatter excitedly and scrutinize the packet, and Lance puts bites of lunch goo in his mouth, where it tastes like sawdust on his sandpaper-dry tongue. 

After school, Lance musters up enough courage to talk to Keith about it. 

Keith is doggedly walking home, and Lance has to sprint to catch up to him, catching him around the wrist. “Keith?” he asks. “Keith— about lunch— you didn’t say anything—” 

Keith turns around to face him. “What’s there to say about it?” he asks. 

Whatever Lance was expecting, it wasn’t that. And the way Keith is looking at him makes his stomach hurt, although he’s not quite sure why. “So you don’t think I should go?” 

“What on earth? No! That’s the exact  _ opposite  _ of what I think!” Keith shakes his head, frustrated. “Lance, it’s a  _ half-off  _ scholarship. What’s stopping you from taking it?” 

So many things, but the first thing that comes out of Lance’s mouth is, “We’re supposed to go to college together.” 

And here, Keith shakes his wrist out of Lance’s grip. “No, we’re not  _ supposed _ to do that,” Keith says. “That’s ridiculous. Of course I’m bummed that we can’t do that, but Lance, this is  _ MIT _ . You can’t— whatever  _ this _ —” he gestures at the space between them “—is, it isn’t as important. It won’t last. It can’t last. Go to MIT.” 

Lance stares resolutely off into space. “Whatever.” 

It’s foolish of him, he thinks, for even trying to calculate Keith into the rest of his life, when there’s no possibility of anything going further. But against his better judgment, his heart had tried. It’s probably a good thing that Keith’s more pragmatic. But God, it hurts. The packet of paper weighs down his backpack like it’s a hundred pounds. 

“It kills,” Keith says softly. “But Lance, you gotta go. You wanna be an astronaut, right?” 

“That’s a kid’s dream,” Lance says. He swallows around the lump in his throat. Space is a dream; what matters here is reality. “Keith, why can’t you see I’m not good enough for MIT? They’re crazy. I’m stupid.” 

“Don’t you dare call yourself that,” Keith says, furious. “MIT’s not crazy, and you’re not stupid. They were impressed enough with your paper that they were willing to cough up a couple of thousands on your behalf. The only thing that could stop you is whatever crazy thought process you’ve got going on in your head.” 

Lance stands rooted to the spot, unable to speak. 

“You gotta think about it. Why won’t you give yourself a chance?” Keith’s eyes flash like lightning. “Whatever. If you don’t go, you better have a better reason than some bogus shit like you aren’t good enough or that you wanna follow me to college. If not, I’ll kill you.” 

Keith runs off, not looking back. Lance stares at his retreating form for a few seconds, then turns around to head for home. 

\---

He waits until dinner to bring it up with his mother. 

“My astronomy teacher sent my paper over to MIT,” Lance says. “They’re offering me a half-off scholarship.” 

“Mmhm,” his mother says, distracted by whether she’d put salt in the soup or not. Then, she registers his words. Her eyes widen, stew spilling off the ladle. “Wait, what? Lance! Are you kidding me?  _ Estas serio _ ?” 

He hands her the packet. “Yeah, but I don’t know if I should take it.” 

Her disbelief equates to that of Keith’s. “Why not?” 

Distantly, Lance wonders why he is the only one who’s unsure of this when all the barriers are so plainly obvious. 

“It’s still so much money,” he fumbles. “I can’t ask you and Dad to do that— he’s already putting in so many hours at the warehouse, and I’m not  _ blind _ . I know that money’s tight.” 

She shakes her head, looks at him. “What kind of parent would I be if I let you pass up this opportunity over something as small as money?” she scoffs. “The reason your father and I work so hard in the first place is so maybe you can have a better life than we do.” 

Next week, Lance hands his astronomy teacher the packet back with his signature scrawled all over the blank lines. She smiles, taking it, and fear envelops him, swallows him whole. What if this is all for nothing? 

At lunch, Pidge and Hunk high-five him, and Keith… his smile is a strange mixture of warmth and sadness.  _ It won’t last _ , is what Keith had said. The words taste bitter whenever Lance replays them. Even a known truth taste bad when spoken aloud. 

And he’s going to MIT. How strange life is, sometimes. 

\---

Summer between junior and senior year is the best one Pidge can remember. Yes, she strains under the burden of college applications and working more hours, but the fact her dad and Matt are both home make her feel almost weightless, like nothing could ever hold her down. 

Four months later, letters arrive, and Pidge and Hunk are both granted admission to Stanford. 

“Stanford doesn’t even know what’s coming for them,” Lance laughs delightedly, when he hears the news. “Try not to dominate the whole campus.” 

“What are you even talking about?” Pidge rolls her eyes but failing to hide her smile. “Dominate the whole campus? Get with reality, Lance.” 

Lunch that day is school food shoved aside in favor of the cookies Hunk and his mother made, more than the four of them could possibly eat. It’s January of 1976 and Pidge is going to Stanford in September. After all this time, she’s made it here, and even though for the first time in her life, she and Lance will be separated, she can’t say she’s got any objections to these outcomes. 

There’s still six months of high school to finish, though. 

“How’s your senior year?” Allura asks cheerfully, coming into the back room as Pidge is carefully folding clothing. 

Pidge shrugs. “It’s pretty normal,” she says. 

“I’m not overworking you or anything, right?” Allura asks, although she’s never overworked Pidge. Any overwork Pidge has definitely brought upon herself. 

Pidge frowns, confused. “Of course not.” 

The topic comes up with Coran, too, who regales her with the wild shenanigans that he and his friends may or may not have gotten up to in their senior year. And while the real events are probably highly watered-down, Pidge thinks she gets what Coran is trying to say. 

All throughout high school, her gaze has always been cast upward and outward, toward the shores of Vietnam or up to the expanses of the stars. Has she ever lived in the moment? She can’t say that she really wishes she went to parties or on dates like everyone else, but for the past few years, Pidge has always been running forward. 

With the next checkpoint fixed at September, she is fixed in place. So for the first time, she decides to maybe try to do what everybody else is doing. 

She, Lance, Hunk, and Keith cautiously stop studying so much. They go off to a couple of movies, eat at the In N’ Out Burger, dance to awful music, build a giant robot painted various colors that they deem Voltron, defender of the known universe. 

It’s Hunk who voices it aloud. “We’re going to be separated,” he says, shrugging. He’s never been good at hiding his emotions, and Pidge can tell that the words pain him. “Might as well make some memories that don’t involve textbooks and gross cafeteria food.” 

Pidge goes out of her depth. She even agrees to get her nails done with her mom, which, while not a horrendous experience, is not something she has any desire to repeat. It doesn’t work very well on her, anyway. The bright green is rubbed off within the course of a weekend with the combination of her tinkering and her absentminded chipping. 

\---

“Hey,” Hunk asks in April, “Are we going to the dance?” 

Pidge double-takes. Around this time every year, posters start going up around school advertising for prom. She’s never paid any notice to them— prom’s a thing for seniors and for people who scored dates. But now that Hunk has posed the question, she wonders.  _ Are  _ they going to prom? 

Pidge opens her mouth to speak, but Lance beats her to it. “What do you mean,  _ we _ ?” he demands. “You’re going with Shay, right?” 

Hunk blushes. He and Shay have been going steady since spring of junior year, and Pidge knows nothing about the logistics of dating, but she’s fairly certain that Shay is expecting Hunk to take her to prom. 

“She’d be okay with not going,” Hunk says. 

“Oh,  _ no  _ way she’d be,” Lance says, like he’s an expert on girls. “Buddy.  _ Buddy _ . Tell me you’re going with Shay.” 

Pidge, not one to weigh in on such matters, makes an exception solely for the fact she is confused and dislikes being confused. “Yeah, you guys are dating. Why wouldn’t you?” 

Hunk shrugs, looks down. “There’s no point in prom without you guys. That was why I asked.” 

The table explodes with objection, Pidge speaking fast as she tells Hunk how illogical his reasoning is. It takes her a minute to realize that Hunk can’t possibly comprehend the words flying at him from three directions, and that he’s also trying to shrink down behind his food. 

Pidge herself doesn’t have a date. She has no idea what’s up with Keith and Lance— she’s never found it her place to pry into those matters, not when Lance seemed to be at odds with those matters himself— but she’s fairly certain they won’t go  _ together _ , either. However, she’s okay with dancing, and is about to suggest that she come with when Keith beats her to it. 

“We’ll all go to prom, then,” he says. 

“We will?” Lance asks, surprised. Pidge’s eyes rounden. Did  _ Keith  _ really just suggest that? 

Keith shrugs. “We can take turns dancing with Pidge.” 

Lance scoffs. “Pidge doesn’t count.” 

“She’s a girl, you know,” Keith says, unmoved, and Pidge can’t help the small smile that breaks across her face. 

“Yeah, I  _ am  _ a girl, Lance,” Pidge says. “And who knows if I’d be willing to dance with you?” 

“Whatever, Pidge. If you wanna dance with me, you’ll have to get in line,” Lance says, just to be ridiculous, and Pidge laughs. Keith laughs, too, but it’s small and uncomfortable. 

“Real talk— are you guys being serious?” Pidge says, hastily switching the subject. “Because I mean, I  _ am  _ willing to go. Doesn’t sound too terrible. Heard there’s free punch.” 

“That stuff’s probably spiked, don’t touch it,” Keith says. “But if you’re down, I’m down.” 

Lance crosses his arms. “Same, then. Be there or be square.” He lasers in on Hunk, who looks slightly dazed. “Alright, I guess we’re all going. So go ask Shay out, get yourself some fresh threads, and dance.” 

\---

She doesn’t really think about prom until it actually happens. It isn’t something Pidge is overly excited for— talk at school rapidly becomes centered around the subject, but she ignores it. It’s only three days before that she realizes that she probably needs a dress, even if she’s not going with a date, so she bites her cheek and asks her mom. 

“Pidge!” her mom explodes. “In three  _ days _ ? Why didn’t you tell me before? There’s nothing I can do now!” 

Her dad shakes his head. “Nothing I can do either, Pidge,” he says sympathetically. “You know that.” 

Pidge winces. Racks her brains. And, somehow, ends up in the position of such desperation that she asks Allura what she would do. 

“Oh, I’d love to help you on that!” Allura says, smiling, and Pidge breathes a huge sigh of relief. Her relief is short-lived, though, because there’s a gleam in Allura’s eye that sets off another wave of tension. “I’ll rent you a dress for the night with no charge, given that I get to pick it.” 

Surprisingly, it’s a good dress. But then again, Allura has good taste. 

On Friday, she finds herself in front of the mirror in the living room, feeling alien in her own skin. The dress is apple-green, the sleeves capped, and it flares out slightly at the waist. The fabric is soft. She hasn’t worn a dress in years, and she wonders if it looks bad on her. She doesn’t even bother with makeup— she feels ridiculous enough as it is. 

Her mom gushes, and Pidge allows a full three minutes of it before pleading her to stop. 

“I have to go to Lance’s,” Pidge says, as an excuse to split. 

Her mom waves a hand. “Of course, of course. My bad. You just— you look so beautiful—” 

Pidge groans. “Mom, please.” 

She’s meeting up with Lance over at his house, and the two of them will regroup with Keith and Hunk at the school. Pidge slips on black shoes, a minimum of comfort. Her mom looks  _ radiant _ , watching her. But— and Pidge only realizes this now, as she was too embarrassed beforehand— also secretive. 

“Are you hiding something?” she asks, suspicious. 

“No, no, of course not,” her mom says. Pidge’s eyes narrow. Her mother is good at many things, and lying is not one of them. But it’s only a minute before Pidge finds out for herself, when she steps out onto the sidewalk and sees Matt. 

Matt, who is supposed to be at college, but is  _ here _ . 

“What?” she sputters, speechless. “Matt—” 

“Pidge Holt,” he says grandly. “Will you allow me the honor of accompanying you to prom?” 

Pidge snaps her mouth shut, adjusting to the surprise, and has to struggle to tamp down the smile that threatens to overtake her whole face once she processes the question. 

Pidge isn’t one to care about whether she’s going with someone or not, but playing the role of Keith and Lance’s cover isn’t particularly appealing, and neither is going with someone she doesn’t know at all. But this is Matt, her brother. Maybe the only person in the world, except her dad, who sees her as both a girl and a scientist, who’d gifted her with the nickname that had allowed her to be taken seriously. 

“I suppose,” she says, and Matt grins and offers her his arm. 

\---

Lance wonders if he’s having fun. 

Dancing alone has never been a problem for him. He does a couple songs with Pidge— Matt’s here, somehow, so she ends up having to divide her time between three people— but mostly, he just grooves on his own. 

He startles when Keith materializes by his side. “Hey, wanna get out of here?” Keith asks. 

With the music going on, Keith has to press his mouth close to Lance’s ear. Lance feels the shape of the words rather than hears them, and his face heats up. 

And since whenever has he been able to say no to Keith? “Yeah, sure,” he says. 

Prom is halfway over when the two of them leave, Lance yelling at Pidge that he’s going to go, don’t wait up for him. He and Keith exit out into the night, warm air on Lance’s skin, Keith’s eyes staring resolutely ahead. The two of them are wearing suits, Lance with a blue bowtie, Keith with a red rose stuck in the front pocket of his white shirt. 

Keith looks good. Illegally good. 

“What up?” Lance asks, trying hard not to be distracted by Keith’s attire. “Too many people for you? Or was the music too mainstream?” 

“Nah. Just felt out of place,” Keith says simply. Then adds, “Sorry for dragging you out, too.” 

“S’fine. I don’t think I quite belonged there, either.” That’s not the whole truth. The whole truth is that dancing with Pidge was pretty fun, as was dancing alone, but he’d so much rather have been dancing with Keith. 

Keith tucks his hands into the pocket of his coattails. “I wanted to dance with you.” Lance isn’t expecting him to say that. The words sear across his chest. “But I couldn’t.” 

“It’d be pretty lame to dance now with no music,” Lance says, voice cracking. Keith hums. He sits down on the curb, and Lance follows suit. 

It’s been awkward between them ever since that conversation about MIT. Lance likes to play Keith’s words in his head—  _ It won’t last. It can’t last _ — to torture himself. Lance has stopped doing anything with Keith that a friend wouldn’t do, even though his feelings haven’t abated in the least. 

Sitting here, he wonders what will happen now. 

“I told Shiro yesterday,” Keith says. “About us.” 

That’s more bravery than Lance will be able to muster in a whole lifetime. “You did what? What did he say?” He asks, astounded. Then, bitter, “What’s there to tell?” 

“I told him that I was sorry because I wanted to be with you.” Lance’s pulse stutters. “Shiro told me not to be sorry. He told me about this boy in Vietnam. His name was Adam, and they were together before the same explosion that took off Shiro’s arm went straight through Adam’s heart.” 

Of all the surprises Lance has been through, this one might take the cake. 

“Oh.” 

Keith continues, not looking at him, “Shiro told me not to be sorry, but I still am, for a different reason. Shiro and Adam— they didn’t even get a chance. And we have a chance but I said it was impossible.” 

They are going off to separate colleges in the span of a couple of months and Lance’s heart is cracking in his chest. “What are you trying to say?” 

“I guess I’m trying to say that if you still want me…” Keith’s mouth quirks up in a wan smile “... then I’m yours.” 

Lance needs to say something or else he’ll drift off this plane of existence. 

“Keith Kogane, did you write that speech out beforehand?” he blurts out, and Keith shoves him, hard. “ _ Ow _ !” 

“You totally deserved that,” Keith says, monotone. 

“Okay, yeah, I did,” Lance agrees, pliable. Keith could say just about anything right now, that the sky is green or the moon is blue, and Lance would probably agree. “And honestly? I’ve  _ always  _ wanted you. So I’m offended you’d even question me on that.” 

“Just making sure,” Keith says, a slight smile on his face. 

Lance is so happy. There isn’t even any guilt weighing him down. He’s just happy. 

They don’t say much after that, sitting there with their feet on the curb. A year later, there will be letters sent back and forth, telephone calls when they can get them, visits in the summer and in the winter. It will stink, and Lance will feel lonely at night and Keith will get a reputation for turning other people down, but it will work. For now they just breathe in each other’s presence, caught up in the universe’s embrace. 

 

**[EPILOGUE]**

 

In 2015, Pidge is nearing sixty years old. 

Time’s passed fast, she thinks. 

She works as an environmental engineer. She’s never married, but she’s switched professions two times. She’s got enough money that she could probably retire at sixty-five if she desires, but she has no wish to do so, not when there’s still so much to learn, so much to do. 

The globe is warming up, and she’s one of many racing for a solution. Pidge finds it amusing that she, who so loved space, has a career focused on the earth. But life’s funny that way. 

The world’s changed a lot since she was a teenager, and while some of the stuff that makes the news is horrifying, there are times when Pidge thinks they’ve made a lot of progress. 

Coding and technology are a new kind of magic, zeroes and ones that power the world, and Pidge learns Java and C++ and plays at being a wizard. She can’t compete with the millennials, but it’s fine, she thinks: they will never understand the way she does about how truly incredible it is that someone can send a text and another person can receive it in the span of a second, all the way on the other side of the earth. And the Internet is like a galaxy all on its own. Pidge uses it for her work, but also to illegally watch the entire series of Star Wars, which she has been following ever since the first movie came out in the summer of 1977. 

There are new words now.  _ Transgender. Aromantic. Asexual.  _ Pidge isn’t sure which ones fit her, but she figures they belong to the new generation, anyway. It’s a new world, a new hope, and she’s just happy to watch. 

Because when she was fourteen, she and Lance had been staring at the stars, and Lance had said, “We should make a wish,” she’d been afraid to because her dreams had seemed so impossible. 

_ A world where she can be a girl and a scientist at the same time, a world where her father and Matt aren’t stuck inside the web of a never ending war, a world where Lance isn’t so afraid to be himself.  _

But here she is now. This is that world. 

She is currently at a wedding. Pidge hadn’t been too surprised when she’d got the invitation in her mail— she and Lance have been friends for half a century now— but she’d been glad. As soon as she’d seen that gay marriage had been legalized, she’d thought of Keith and Lance. 

The two of them look good up there at the altar. This close, she can see that Lance’s eyes are shining with happiness, completely eclipsing the lines around his face, the beginning of a few wrinkles. Next to Pidge, Hunk is crying. 

Pidge adjusts her dress, which is extraordinarily itchy. She herself sees no reason to cry, and just smiles softly. The world spins, and the moon spins, and Pidge stays as a passenger on the ride, suspended in the space between tomorrow and today. 

**Author's Note:**

> ...thank you so so much for making it to the end!
> 
> feel free to comment down below any mistakes you find; i'm literally the least qualified person to write this (i dropped out of ap us history last year) and also i am chinese, so if i got any spanish wrong please tell me. but yeah— if you're here, i'm really grateful, and i hope you enjoyed.


End file.
